


The Null Hypothesis

by tenscupcake



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Seemingly Unrequited Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-22
Updated: 2018-03-04
Packaged: 2019-01-21 13:14:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 46,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12458535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tenscupcake/pseuds/tenscupcake
Summary: Roughly one out of every six people can't feel touch; that is, until their soulmate touches them. Fitz and Jemma are two indignant contributors to that statistic, content to devote their lives to science rather than searching for their supposed 'other half.' Both too clever for high school, they head off to university at sixteen, completely unaware their fates are about to become intertwined. But in a world where soulmates don't always match, it's not always easy to confess to a stranger.A soulmate AU with a twist.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Honestly... can’t believe this is happening.
> 
> To those of you who’ve received notice about this fic because you’re a subscriber for my dw fics, and decided to open it up anyway: first of all, thank you for being willing to branch out with me! Second, I have no idea how to explain myself. You guys know I’ve never written an AU before, and tend to stay away from them when reading. For some reason, this ship is just making my brain function differently (I like to say that s4 of AOS traumatized me so badly it broke my operating system). So... here I am. Not only an AU, but a long one. Cranked out in record time. Also, PLEASE trust me when I say I am desperate to get back to EP. I am going to straight away! This fic was just _clawing_ at my brain nonstop and I knew I had to follow the muse, or suffer the consequences of ignoring it.
> 
> To those of you who’ve never heard of me before but stumbled upon this fic anyway: thank you for your interest! This is not my first fic by a long shot, but it is my first fitzsimmons fic, and my first AU. I hope you enjoy it.
> 
> It’s turned out to be about 40k words, and broken into what I’m fairly certain will be 14 chapters. It is already written start to finish, just needs some polishing here and there are a few chapters that still need to be sent to my beta. I haven’t decided on a posting schedule yet, but I’m pretty sure it’ll be once a week, maybe every other week. I want to try to get another chapter of my existing WIP (yes, EP, for those of you waiting for it!) published in between each update for this fic.
> 
>  **Courtesy content warnings:** other AOS characters make minor appearances. Brief but unambiguous mentions of Philinda.
> 
> Final note: I did my absolute best with the biology/physics in this fic. But, as I’m more of a chemist by training, there may very well be inaccuracies. Please forgive them if you find any! :)

Leo Fitz can tell you all about the amorphous solids known as glasses. The density, heat capacity, and refractive index of borosilicate, the fact that soda lime is the most popular type of glass manufactured. But he has no idea what it feels like to hold a jar of jam, or to press his nose against a window as he watches a snowfall.

He’s got the standard molar entropy, viscosity, and critical point of water memorized. He can draw a complete phase diagram with thirty seconds and a sheet of scratch paper; calculate the boiling and freezing point of just about any aqueous solution in his head. But none of that helps him describe what it feels like to take a shower.

He knows the melting point and thermal conductivity of iron; the polymeric structure and elasticity of rubber. But the chain and the tire of the swing at primary school felt pretty much the same.

Of course, he can recite adjectives all day long. Smooth, polished, wet, hard, bouncy. Many of these are useful terms relevant to physical properties. But that’s all they are: words correlated with definitions and observations in his head. There’s no tactile memory to associate with the adjective ‘soft.’ Only numeric values about an object’s lack of resistance to an external force. A twig will easily snap; a steel rod of the same thickness will take a far greater force just to bend.

Cake is easier to chew than peanut brittle. A bed is easier to sleep on than a linoleum floor. Peanut brittle will crack his teeth if he’s not careful; a hard floor will exert excess pressure on joints.

Oh, because there’s one thing Fitz can feel: pain.

A hot stove burns. A needle pricks. A kick to the shin hurts like hell.

Of course, he knows pain is evolutionarily necessary, but it doesn’t make it easier to deal with.

He lacks every other sense of touch, but not pain. Because the universe couldn’t be that kind, could it? It’s just how the world works, at least for people like him.

Yes, Fitz has known since before he started school: he has a soulmate. And this supposed ‘soulmate’ of his is the only thing that can unlock the one sense he lacks.

A bunch of rubbish, that is.

He couldn’t tell a slippery floor from a carpeted one, as he learned to walk. Just before his first birthday, he slipped on some tile and fell hard on his hip. It was the first time he felt anything physical, and it was not a pleasant surprise.

He dropped everything he tried to pick up as a toddler, couldn’t get a good enough sense of his hand’s grip on it. His dad never ceased to berate him for everything he spilt and broke, and if he was in a bad mood that day, he didn’t shy away from hitting him.

_Stupid, clumsy boy!_

Conditioned to fear the paternal repercussions he might face, he quickly learned to grip objects harder than he thought he needed to.

Which inevitably led to him shattering a glass ornament in his hand when he was seven, leaving him with scattered cuts, rivers of blood down his arm and his worst encounter with pain to date. He had to have gauze wrapped around his hand for a week.

It wasn’t long after that that Fitz decided he hated touch altogether.

What’s the point of it?

He can’t even tell when another person touches him, for the most part. Only if they really grab hold does he even feel a vague sense of pressure under his skin that tells him something is there. It’s easier if the person has cold or hot hands, because he can sense temperature all right. Another annoying life-sustaining capability he’d be fine without. But still, if he’s not looking, most light touches will go completely undetected. A fact that is never lost on the few bullies who inadvertently learn he’s one of the seventeen percent of the population with a soulmate.

But he’s got enough sense to understand that touch is important for a large majority of the population. And so, he’s never minded a hug from his mum, or balked at the widespread tradition of shaking someone’s hand upon meeting them. He goes along with the high-fives other blokes like to give, or the pats on his shoulder his teachers mean to reassure him when he gets picked on. He knows it’s how they express affection, concern. And even if he can’t explicitly feel it, closeness is something he can appreciate. Sometimes, it’s nice to have another person nearby.

Still, it’s fruitless to long for something he can’t even fathom. It’s like trying to imagine a colour that doesn’t exist.

So when he’s not wasting away with boredom at school, he indulges in his functioning senses: music, walks around the block, films. And more than anything else, he keeps himself busy tinkering with the collection of gadgets in his room.

No, he doesn’t bother longing. He accepted his lot in life a long time ago. But it never becomes less frustrating, not experiencing the world the way most people do. It’s common for others to describe it as being numb, but he wouldn’t know the difference. He’s never been given any sort of local anaesthetic to prevent him from feeling the one thing he’s able to: pain. He understands the concept well enough: numbing agents block the ability of neurons to send signals to the brain. He knows, objectively, that for people like him: pretty much all of his sensory neurons, except for those temperature and pain-sensing nuisances, are similarly incapable of sending any signals despite the lack of numbing agent. But that doesn’t mean he understands what he’s missing. Not really.

His mum has never much help, having all her senses all her life. All she’s ever been able to do to help him is get books and documentaries on the subject, reading and watching them along with him since he was old enough to understand.

His dad has never understood or cared. _If ye can’t touch a burd, what’s the point of livin’?_

It’s not long after Fitz’ tenth birthday that he leaves for work and never comes home.

Fitz has always told himself they’re better off without him.

He’s eleven when he starts secondary school, and it only reinforces his hatred of his severely handicapped fifth sense. He gets punched in the arm, shoved into the lockers for doing better than everyone else on tests and assignments.

To make matters worse, his male classmates suddenly become interested in kissing girls, and the divide between the minority with and the majority without soulmates deepens.

They seem to gravitate toward one another, though, the boys with soulmates. They cluster together at lunch hour, sharing both a table and a pronounced sense of confusion at everyone holding hands and hugging their friends. He wouldn’t say they’re his best mates, because anytime he tries to talk electronics or aerodynamics, they look at him like he’s mental. But they at least understand him in one aspect, and they don’t try to kick him to see for themselves whether he can feel pain. They make showing up for school tolerable.

But things take a turn for the worse when Fitz is thirteen, and his mum’s job gets transferred to America.

They at least let him start high school, as it’s called here, and he expects his schoolwork to finally be a tad more challenging, but it’s just the opposite. He’s more and more bored as the weeks go by, despite being in classes with people one to three years his senior already.

As if moving to another country isn’t bad enough, everyone around him is suddenly obsessed with sex, and he can’t comprehend why.

But worst of all, high school has Grant Ward.

The world’s most insufferable pretty boy. A senior. Captain of the wrestling team. Dumb as a bag of rocks. Stupid perfect skin and perfect body and perfect hair.

Fitz’s accent draws a substantial amount of unwanted attention, at first. And Ward is one of the first to introduce himself. Pre-calculus, first period. He pretends to be interested in engineering. And in the coming weeks, pretends to be Fitz’s friend. But really, he’s only copying off his homework whenever Fitz gets distracted with one of his engineering projects.

Fitz only wishes he didn’t have to find that out the hard way. It’s a few months into the year, when Fitz dares to approach him in front of his friends, and asks him to come over to his place and learn circuits. Ward’s only response is to throw him in the pool, clothes and everything. In the middle of water polo practice.

Fitz isn’t too keen on making new friends, after that.

Thankfully, there’s one other bloke in Pre-calculus who’s as interested in engineering as he is. A bloke who ends up being his only mate in high school: Mack. He’s fourteen, one of the unlucky few with a soulmate, and he works on cars with his dad whenever he can. He wants to be a mechanic for even bigger things when he grows up.

Though they’re interested in the same subject matter, with how fast Fitz tends to talk and their mismatched accents, it’s often hard for Mack to keep up. The first time they ever eat lunch together, Mack jokingly tells him to ‘slow down, Turbo.’ The nickname sticks, but Fitz doesn’t mind. At least Mack listens, and understands the unending frustrations having a soulmate can bring.

For the most part, people like him and Mack can blend in. Aside from asking every person you meet, or pulling rude pranks, there’s no quick way to discern them from everyone else. And Fitz is at least grateful that no one besides Mack has found out about him yet.

But one day, near the end of his first year of high school, Fitz is forced to talk to a girl he’s been assigned a presentation for English with. Basically the only thing Fitz knows about Kara is that Ward fancies her – he’d already asked her to the Prom (which Fitz finds gross, because she’s only fourteen and he’s seventeen, but that’s beside the point.)

Kara has been avoiding him, but he finally catches up with her at her locker. Unfortunately, Ward happens to swagger by at the same time, and when he sees them talking, he goes completely mental. Pins him against the row of lockers, crushing his vertebrae against his own backpack. Fitz’s shirt in his too-powerful fist, Ward demands to know if he’s been touching her behind his back.

Gripped with the fear of being punched in the face, Fitz slips.

“I can’t even _feel_ anything, Ward,” he blurts out, with less of the derision he’d been going for. It actually sounds more like a pathetic plea.

To Fitz’s surprise, Ward lets go of his shirt and backs a few steps away.

“Oh, you’re one of _them_?” he asks, laughing for some reason Fitz has yet to ascertain.

Fitz glares at Ward, feeling like he could punch him, but it doesn’t make him shut up.

“Scrawny geek like you, Leopold?”

Oh, Fitz forgot to mention. Since the pool incident, Ward likes to refer to him by his full given name. Generally, he doesn’t mind it much, but the way Ward says it makes him flinch every time. The condescension in his tone reminds him of the way his father said it.

“Half the school can’t even understand what you’re saying,” Ward goes on. Fitz thought jabs at his accent stopped being funny a long time ago, but at this point, Kara, too, covers her mouth to hide her laughter.

Fitz says nothing, only clenches his teeth as tight as his fists and hopes Ward will just walk away. He’d never actually win in this hypothetical fist fight anyway.

But still, Ward carries on.

“You must be one of the mistakes. No way there’s actually a match out there for you.”

Only after this, does Ward take Kara’s hand and stalk away, leaving Fitz to finish the group assignment by himself.

Fitz knows there are certain errors – mistakes, if you will – in the universe’s twisted matchmaking process. Social scientists’ estimated success rate, based on the best available data, is proposed to be ninety percent. Of the other unlucky ten percent, some never meet their soulmate, and others end up in love triangles of doom: having matched to someone who is destined for someone else.

He’s always known this was a possibility for himself. A scientist, after all, considers all possibilities and outcomes when formulating hypotheses.

But Fitz had convinced himself from an early age it didn’t matter whether he ever properly matched with someone. That it might even be preferable if he never found his soulmate, because he didn’t want one. Never asked for one.

So he had convinced himself.

But deep down, he was holding out hope, after all. That he was in the ninety percent majority and, despite his reluctance, he would find them anyway.

And in one conversation, those hopes were as swiftly crushed as realised.

Somehow, Fitz manages not to shed a tear until his mum picks him up from school. She insists Ward is just jealous he doesn’t have a soulmate, and Fitz wants to believe her.

But he knows better.

He resolutely keeps his head down for the remainder of high school. Starts taking night courses at a local community college so he can graduate early.

Eight universities are fighting to admit him by time he turns sixteen. Offering handsome scholarships for both tuition and room and board.

But day and night, Ward’s voice still echoes in his ears. _You must be one of the mistakes._

Most days, Fitz just wishes he didn’t have a soulmate at all.

As he packs up his things for the road trip to Uni, he can only hope it’ll be easier to put it all out of his mind once he’s there. A fresh start. Hopefully, a more intellectually stimulating one.

 

\-----

 

Jemma Simmons can tell you all about sensory neurons. Their structure, function, evolutionary history. Olfactory and gustatory receptors for smell and taste, photoreceptors in the eyes, hair cells in the ears, thermoreceptors to sense temperature, nociceptors that alert the brain to tissue damage (which quickly translates to pain), proprioceptors for balance and position. She’s known about them all since she was six, and first got her hands on a biology textbook from the library.

She can also describe in detail a special class of these neurons – mechanoreceptors. But only in the same clinical and impartial way she can describe how gills function, or the multistep process of photosynthesis. Because she can’t relate to breathing water or synthesizing glucose from carbon dioxide any more than she can relate to these mysterious tactile neurons.

She can tell you all about the Meissner corpuscles located near the surface of the skin, responsible for detecting light touch: their elongated nuclei and coiled shape, the fact that they’re more concentrated in the fingers and lips. Or Pacinian corpuscles, which are particularly receptive to mechanical and pressure and vibration. Merkel nerve endings that allow for detection of heterogeneities in texture on a micro scale. The Ruffinian endings, too, that detect skin stretch and sustained pressure.

But she can also tell you with certainty that she is among the seventeen percent of the population for which the aforementioned mechanoreceptors are completely inactive.

Every single subclass of mechanoreceptor in her skin produces no action potentials, sends no information to the central nervous system whatsoever.

Why?

Because Jemma, like those seventeen percent of people, has a soulmate existing somewhere on the planet. And only a direct touch from said soulmate can activate these long-dormant neurons.

It’s not easy, growing up without a vital sense.

To compensate for lack of sensory function in her skin, she grips everything hard enough to feel the pressure in the bones and tendons of her fingers. It’s a coping mechanism she learned early on so she didn’t drop things.

But it becomes a double-edged sword, as she gets older.

There’s the first time she shakes hands with someone her age, and the girl yelps in pain and yanks her hand away. Jemma is apologetic, but chalks it up to the girl’s weak constitution, rather than her own grip being too strong.

There’s the sheer number of crayons and pencils she snaps in primary school. Though it’s annoying, her parents are happy to buy her new sets as she burns through them, so Jemma writes it off as drawback inherent to these writing utensils.

The real wake-up call doesn’t come until she’s eight, and picks up a small beaker in science class for the first time. It promptly breaks into several pieces in her hand, cutting into her thumb and palm. Frightened by the sudden rush of blood, she drops the beaker, and it shatters further on the floor, calling the entire class’ attention to her destructive inexperience.

While she’s at the nurse’s station, surreptitiously wiping her tears on her shirt (because the universe couldn’t be so kind as to deactivate her nociceptors, too), Jemma decides it’s time to make a change.

In the safety of her bedroom, she stockpiles different materials and teaches herself how much force is required to maintain her grip for each one. Finding the middle ground between not dropping anything and not injuring herself or someone else.

Jemma prides herself on her ability to adapt to what she’s been given.

But it doesn’t mean she doesn’t sometimes feel as though she’s missing out.

When she’s three, watching her mum tickle her baby cousin’s stomach. The way he laughs, she figures it has to be something enjoyable. Even though she can’t comprehend it, part of her is undeniably jealous of a type of attention she never received.

When she’s nine, and declines several invitations to pool parties, not at all understanding the appeal of communal bodies of water. There are more efficient, and more sanitary, ways of cooling off on warm days.

Her frustration on her tenth birthday, when one of her tenuous friends, Michelle, gets her a plain brown blanket. According to everyone else, it’s miraculously soft and comfortable. But to Jemma, it’s just a brown square of cloth that will be no more effective than the sheets and duvet she’s already got. She never complains aloud, because it’s about as easy for Michelle to understand Jemma as it is for Jemma to understand Michelle. They’re still just kids, really.

Oh, and her absolute horror at age twelve, when she notices her classmates are starting to fantasise amongst themselves about snogging one another.

Thankfully, by this time, Jemma has found a few of the members of her grade level who share her soulmate status, and by extension, her bewilderment and mild disgust at the concept.

For a while, Jemma hopes that people without soulmates eventually learn the do’s and don’ts of interacting with people _with_ them. There’s plenty of blogs and books and podcasts available, if one wishes to learn.

But before long, she realizes it’s naïve, even idealistic, to think any real majority of them will care enough to do so. As Jemma grows older, she realizes that much of society has divided itself up. Professional and familial relationships aside, people that have soulmates tend to spend their time with others that do as well. Same goes for people without. Generally speaking, it’s just easier to be around people who experience the world the same way you do.

Others who feel they might be missing out.

And yet, ironically, the message of popular culture is that it’s those _without_ soulmates who are missing out.

Supposedly, Jemma is among the lucky ones, having a soulmate alive and waiting for her out there.

Perhaps that’s why people like her don’t get much public sympathy.

The way it’s portrayed in films and television, it seems like such a fantastic, romantic thing. Finding that special someone, sharing a moment of wonder as you simultaneously discover this physical sense for the first time. It’s always seemed wonderfully intimate.

But, a biologist by nature, Jemma knows that Mother nature makes mistakes. And soulmates are no exception to that rule.

Normally, undesirable traits are weeded out by natural selection. But in many respects, humanity has found ways to cheat evolution. People no longer have to be the fastest, strongest, or most intelligent creatures to survive. Technological advancements in medicine, agriculture, and engineering have made it possible for people to survive droughts, heart attacks, deadly winters, congenital disabilities. And it’s brilliant. Jemma very much wants to be a contributor to such technologies in the future.

But with respect to soulmates, it only means the errors continue to propagate.

Some never find their match. Others are mismatched entirely. Data conflicts, and accurate statistics are hard to nail down, but something like ten percent of people with soulmates either never find them, or discover their soulmate is earmarked for someone else.

Jemma has never liked her one-in-ten odds of this soulmate thing crashing and burning. If she had been able to choose whether or not to have a soulmate prior to her conception, she’d likely have opted out.

Because ever since she could speak, she knew her Uncle Jeff was mismatched.

Aunt Emily was his soulmate, but he wasn’t hers. When they met, their hands touched, and his life was changed forever, but hers wasn’t. Still, years went by and he couldn’t seem to stay away from her. Eventually, she’d given up trying to find her proper soulmate and committed to Jeff. Jemma could never quite understand why her uncle would want to be in a relationship with someone who wasn’t his proper match. But she supposes it’s a potent force, the compulsion to spend time with your soulmate once you meet them.

Their relationship was not physical in nature; Jeff never thought it was fair to her. But it didn’t matter to him. They loved each other, and that was all that mattered. They were happy together. Jemma even dared to think, growing up, they were made for each other, whether or not the universe agreed. And she always thought that, well, mistakes or not, maybe the concept of soulmates isn’t so bad. People can still make it work, even if the odds aren’t in their favour.

It wasn’t until Jemma was eight, ten years into her aunt and uncle’s marriage, that Emily found her proper soulmate, after all.

She was gone from their house within a month. Love wasn’t enough for her, in the end.

Seeing her uncle go through such devastation, Jemma changed her outlook.

This universe they live in is no romantic utopia.

It’s more like a dystopia. And she wants no part in it.

Thankfully, Jemma’s simply not interested in anyone. Most of the people around her are too thick to hold a conversation with, and though she occasionally finds blokes nice to look at, every single one her age is far too immature to earn even platonic affection, let alone romantic.

So she carries on, perfectly content to never find her soulmate, because she doesn’t need one. She’s perfectly self-sufficient without one, and positive a boy would merely slow her down. Hinder her career.

Deep down, she’s terribly curious to meet them one day (it’s not confined to a different gender, after all). To suddenly experience a sensation she can’t currently comprehend. She can’t help it. Investigating the unknown is what science is all about, and Jemma has been a scientist since before she could crawl.

But ever since what happened to Jeff, she’s been terrified that if she ever does meet them, she will confront a similar fate. They’ll feel nothing when the two of them touch for the first time, but Jemma won’t be able to stay away. And a decade from now, she’ll be left heartbroken and alone.

So, she spends her time distancing herself from potential all-encompassing romances: studying physiology, visiting museums, asking for extra homework from her science teachers. It’s not a great way to make friends, but Jemma has known since she was four that she wants to be a doctor of something. It may be premature, but she starts chipping away at that goal as early as primary school.

When she’s thirteen, her dad’s job has them all relocating to Los Angeles.

At first, she’s distraught by the imminent upheaval, but makes peace with the decision relatively quickly. Really, what difference does it make? They speak English there, at least, and it’s not like she had many friends back home. Too busy studying, whether for school or for her own independent research. There are plenty of universities, medical schools, biotechnology industries for her to choose from. She tries to be optimistic and look at the migration as an opportunity.

But high school in America brings its own challenges. Much to Jemma’s dismay, the soulmate rubbish doesn’t go away. It’s most of the gossip around school, at least for those who have been publicly outed one way or the other, and Jemma is more thankful every day she is not among that crowd.

She trudges through the next few years, juggling schoolwork with volunteering at the local clinic to bolster her medical knowledge and visiting as many biological research facilities as humanly possibly for a teenager, knowing that these are more worthwhile avenues to dedicate her time and intelligence.

She at least acquires a friend in computer science – Daisy. She knows as much about computers as Jemma does about biology, if not more. Near the end of the first month of school, she hacks into the teacher’s computer and puts up and image of a daisy – the flower, not the person – over his real-time tutorial. And the best part is, no one ever finds out who had hacked the computer.

Yes, Jemma quite likes Daisy. Jemma only knows the very basics about computers – binary numeric system, at least a handful of the various parts required to build one – but it’s fascinating to find someone so enthusiastic about any subject.

Daisy’s got a soulmate, too, and hasn’t met them yet, and it’s a relief to have someone close-by who always understands – or rather, who shares her perpetual lack of understanding about one of the core mammalian senses. They can’t help each other with their extracurricular projects, but they do enjoy one another’s company at lunch. Sometimes on weekends.

Most of the other students are unpleasant. Telling her she should spend more time outside. Begging her for help on assignments when they discover she’s at the top of the class. Always asking her if she’s got a boyfriend. If there’s anyone she’s interested in. As if that’s any of their business. It only makes it harder to put it out of her mind, but that’s all she wants to do.

Then there’s Aida, the worst of the lot: always mocking her accent when she speaks up in class. The sheer audacity some Americans have acquired.

Daisy does the honour of hacking into her Facebook and posting something embarrassing (without being inappropriate or cruel), and Jemma is thrilled to have someone that always has her back in such circumstances.

Still, she’ll be much happier out of this hamster cage of hormone-fuelled adolescents. She may technically be one of them, but she’s never felt like it.

So she does everything she can to finish high school early. Spends her summers taking courses at local community colleges to better prepare for university.

Before she’s finished her second year, she’s already been offered a full ride to ten.

By the end of her third, the school district finally lets her graduate.

For Jemma, the only difficult part about heading off to university at sixteen is leaving her only friend.

“You can’t leave me here!” Daisy says, for the hundredth time, even as she’s helping Jemma pack for the flight.

“Daisy, I’ll go mad if I have to spend another year here.”

“And I won’t?”

“It’s only a four-hour flight,” Jemma tries to be optimistic, but realizes how ghastly that sounds as soon as she’s said it. “Well, I’ll have my own room. You can visit whenever you want.”

They both sigh, knowing neither of them can afford the airfare.

“You better Skype me at least once a week,” Daisy threatens, thrusting a finger at her.

“If I don’t, I’m certain you’ll find some way to tap into my camera,” Jemma teases.

“Damn right.”

“Besides, you’ll be there with me in a year, won’t you?”

“If I get in.”

“Of course you will. They’d be lucky to have you.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As promised - a new chapter's going up since I got an update for my other WIP out this weekend :) Here's where it starts to get properly fun (for me anyway)! Hope you guys enjoy.

Fitz’s first day at university doesn’t bode well for the semester. Each class he attends on Monday – general chemistry I, economics, and art history – is so introductory-level and simple. Aside from the gaps in his schedule and the fact that attendance isn’t recorded, it feels rather like high school (and three years of that place was enough to drive him half mad).

General chemistry he can’t believe he has to take. He’s more than proficient in the concepts that will be taught. AP exams and community college courses bailed him out of a laundry list of the university’s general education requirements, but this is an unfortunate exception. The university just decided to change its curriculum the year after he’d taken it at his local community college and, subsequently, they refused to accept his transfer credits for that particular course.  

He’s planning to skip the lectures and just show up for labs and exams, until he finds out there will be quizzes for participation points at the beginning of each period starting next week. What a bunch of rubbish. He hopes he can at least spend most of that lecture time on his laptop, modelling equations and running simulations for the drone he’s working on.

The rest of the week, at least, bodes a bit better. He actually finds himself paying attention and taking a bit of notes in a few courses. Biochemistry is one: relatively speaking, it’s always been an area he’s weaker in. But it’s not the most riveting subject matter. He’s always found biology far too unpredictable for his taste. His two engineering courses, though, he’s properly excited about. Mechatronics and Numerical Analysis. He’s hoping to get some additional resources from the professors of those two, and look into joining one of their laboratories.

If half his classes weren’t pathetically simple and he didn’t pick up new subjects so easily, he might be a bit overwhelmed after the first week. In his situation, a typical student would probably be quite overwhelmed. His plan to graduate in three years has his schedule jam-packed: on average, he’ll be taking twenty-two units per semester. Normally, they don’t even allow such a thing, but they’ve made an exception for Fitz.

But Fitz is no typical student, so it’s far from overwhelming. Underwhelming, if anything. He’s a bit worried his longstanding boredom from high school may continue here as well.

Part of it is that none of his labs meet the first week. He has to complete an embarrassingly intuitive laboratory safety training course online, but other than that, he gets those periods off. He reckons he’ll be less bored when his schedule fills out with an extra twelve hours a week of lab work. Hands-on investigation is inherently less boring than sitting in class.

But for this week, in the three hour blocks he’ll normally be in various labs throughout campus, he stays in his room instead, continuing to chip away at his drone prototype one piece of hardware and one line of code at a time.

And that’s exactly what he’s doing after lunch the following Tuesday. Not yet in the habit of trekking to lab, he loses track of time. By the time he glances at his phone, he finds it’s 2:00 on the dot.

He’s already late for his first lab of the week.

When he crashes through the door of the third-floor teaching laboratory in the Chem building, the room is completely full. The students are already outfitted in their gloves and coats, goggles at the ready, and only one voice sounds through the room: that of their lab’s TA. He can’t see whoever the bloke is through all the shelves and ventilation shafts above the benches, but whoever he is has stopped his monologue in the wake of Fitz’s entrance.

Oops.

Everyone in the aisle he’s entered into is already paired off. Trying to catch his breath as quietly as possible, he makes his way to the front so he can get a better view of the rest of the lab.

As soon as he’s within eyesight of the TA, he’s on the receiving end of a lecture.

“I just finished explaining to the rest of the class: being more than five minutes late to a lab means you can’t participate in that lab, and you’ll have to take a zero.” Fitz’s stomach drops. Did he just sprint all the way here for nothing? “You’re all right for today. But starting next week, be on time or don’t come at all.”

“Yes, sir,” he responds dully. As soon as he turns his head, he rolls his eyes.

A quick glance around makes it seem as though everyone in the room does already have a partner.

Well, that’s fine. He’d rather work alone anyway. He’ll probably get it done before anyone else even without a protocol, and any one of these sods would likely just be a constant irritation.

“Anyone missing a partner?” the TA calls out. Fitz whips his head back in his direction, staring at him in horror. This he did not expect.

He reluctantly scans around the room, hoping no one will respond.

Much to his dismay, there’s a girl sitting by herself to his far right, the last bench against the wall. Her hand is raised tentatively, and when Fitz meets her eyes, she narrows hers, like she’s upset at the prospect of being paired with him. She looks younger than most of the others, almost like she could be his age. But looks can be deceiving, he’s learned.

Taking a deep breath, Fitz hustles over to her station. The sooner he’s out of the spotlight, the better.

“Excellent,” the bloke’s voice sounds behind him. “The two young geniuses get to work together. This’ll be interesting.”

Fitz glances back at him, scowling in confusion. ‘Two young geniuses?’ Just what he needs. A smart arse. It doesn’t matter how clever she _thinks_ she is; she’s still going to slow him down.

He slumps into the stool next to hers, resigned to his fate. The mystery girl is quiet while the TA finishes telling them what they’re going to do today. It’s painfully simple: dissolve a pre-1982 penny in nitric acid. Precipitate the copper with sodium hydroxide. Form a copper oxide by heating the solution. Add sulphuric acid to form copper sulphate. Add zinc to re-form copper metal precipitate.

Wow. Magic.

He hastily puts on his coat and gloves on while the bloke is rambling about safety so as not to waste any more time. Then he pulls out his notebook and starts scribbling out the date and experiment title as neatly as he can. He knows these lab reports will be graded partially on legibility. He almost manages to get the whole protocol down before the TA finishes his spiel.

He’s just finishing the last two steps when the bloke announces they’re free to start.

“I’m Jemma,” his unwitting partner says, turning to him without hesitation. “Simmons,” she adds.

He reluctantly pulls his attention from his notebook and looks up at her.

At first glance, when she was half-scowling at him, he had found her a bit intimidating, but now that he’s up close and getting a better look, she’s actually rather nonthreatening. A soft smile on her lips and bright brown eyes that actually seem excited for this drivel. Actually, she’s a bit... nice to look at. Which, he realizes, must be bad news. People with her level of attractiveness generally have proportionately low intelligence. 

“Leo,” he replies. His attempt at a smile falling flat, he turns back to his notebook as quickly as he can to continue writing. “Fitz,” he adds in the same manner that she did.

He should at least give her a chance, really. Maybe she’ll prove him wrong.

What did he want a fresh start for, if he wasn’t going to use it to find some new mates?

“Right then, Leo, I’ll get the reagents. You can get the rest of the supplies.”

_Oh._ She’s not American. For some reason it took him several words to pick up on it, but she’s decidedly English.

His heart suddenly softens to her even more. He knows how wretched it is to start over in a new country. He briefly wonders when she moved to the States. Unable to help himself, he glances back up at her, but before he can even agree to her terms, she’s walking away.

Wait. Did she just _delegate_ a task to him? Does she think this is how it’s going to work, then? His short-lived empathy for her starts to dissolve.

Still, to save them both time, he gets the glassware and materials they’ll need anyway, and is able to get it all situated in their fume hood before she returns with the reagents.

“Found everything all right, then?” she asks when she returns with what he hopes are the appropriate amounts of their acids and bases.

As if it’d be hard for him to locate a couple of beakers in a chemistry lab?

“Hard to misplace a hot plate,” he quips, trying not to let his irritation show too much.

Not only did Jemma acquire the correct concentrations and volumes of the necessary reagents, she _is_ surprisingly clever. She proceeds to the first step of the experiment without being prompted, narrating aloud everything she does as she does it (which, strangely, he finds a bit endearing).

Watching and listening her do everything as accurately as he would have done, Fitz readies the second step to save them time. The pleasant surprise of her competence lifts his mood considerably. Perhaps she is a good candidate for a friend.

“Not from around here, I’m guessing?” she asks as she places their penny in a beaker.

“Glasgow,” he says, adding the appropriate reagent to it.

“Sheffield,” she counters. And after a moment, she adds: “What’s your opinion of America so far?”

He takes a moment of thought for that one, thinking back to high school and the things he regularly sees on TV shows and the news.

“Lives up to the stereotypes.”

His answer makes her chuckle, and he rather likes it, though he’s not sure why. He supposes it’s rare that someone ever holds a conversation with him long enough for him to manage a joke of any kind; even rarer for the other person to laugh at it. Most people don’t seem to get his sense of humour.

Or maybe it’s just the sound of her laugh.

There’s a few minutes of silence as they continue on to the next step, and curiosity starts to gnaw at him. Jemma is the first person he’s met on this campus so far that he hasn’t immediately wanted to terminate contact with. Contrary to his expectations, the experiment is not going terribly at all. Jemma is knowledgeable about every aspect of it. She works with a precision that has him convinced she’s worked in as many labs as he has prior to arriving here. Neither of them has to refer to the protocol, both having memorized it in the time they spent writing it down. That saves more time than anything, he thinks, judging by the way everyone else keeps poring over their lab manuals.

As soon as they have another few moments of down time while a reaction bubbles to completion, he musters the courage to prod a little more.

“When did you move here?” he asks.

“About three years ago, now.”

“Hmm. Me too.”

“Though we didn’t move here, specifically to New Jersey, I mean. My parents are in Los Angeles.”

“Ah,” Fitz nods. “Yeah, my p” – he catches himself – “my mum, she’s in New York.”

“How old are you?” she asks, looking at him like she’s suspicious of his answer.

“Sixteen,” he admits.

“Seriously?” she asks, grinning like she’s pleasantly surprised by his answer.

“Seriously.” He nods, and can’t help smiling back a bit.

“I am too,” she volunteers. “Couldn’t stand another day of high school,” she adds, turning back to their foaming beaker.

This time, it’s his turn to chuckle.

It’s odd, how effortless this conversation is. He supposes he’s just no longer accustomed to being around other Brits anymore. Constantly bombarded with a different vernacular, always feels like the odd one out in conversations. References and idioms fly over his head; new-fangled slang words stump him out of some conversations completely. The World loves to rib Londoners for Cockney slang, but some of the things young Americans say colloquially are just as confusing and nonsensical.

That must be all it is.

“What’s your major?” she asks after the fourth step.

“Engineering.”

“Biochem,” she counters, without prompting.         

And that’s when his hopes for this relationship sink just a little. Biology is so not his field. Their similarities likely begin and end with being British and taking Gen-Chem. What good would a friendship do them? After their GEs are done, they'll likely have no other classes together, no curriculum in common.

To add to that, Jemma soon all but bombards him with trivial questions that sink his hopes even more.

“Do you know when Dr White’s office hours are? Have you done the textbook readings yet? Have you been to the library?”

Clearly, their priorities are not the same.

“The truth is,” he tries to shut down the string of inquiries. “I spend most of my free time working on projects of my own.”

“Really? Like what?” she asks. She seems a bit frustrated with him. Well, ditto.

Without thinking, he tells her about the drone project. Probably offering a bit too many details. Once he gets started talking about it, it’s hard to stop. There’s so rarely anyone willing to listen. He seems to lose her a bit when he delves into the finer details, but she at least pretends he hasn’t.

“Sounds fascinating,” she offers. “And you do that all on your own?”

“For the most part, yeah.”

If only to be polite, he asks what sorts of things she gets up to in her field.

She goes into detail about the pharmaceutical internship she did the summer before she arrived here, and he can’t help but be impressed. She’s not just clever; she must be brilliant. What sort of sixteen-year-old could score an internship at a pharmaceutical company?

But as intrigued as he is by her kindness and intelligence, it isn’t long before he’s reminded of their inherent incompatibility.

Their TA approaches, peering between them to get a look at their settling reaction.

“Where are you two at?” he asks.

“We’re just about to dry the sample –” Fitz begins.

“We’ve just finished precipitating the copper metal –” Jemma says at the same time.

They both shoot each other surprised frowns, but neither of them cuts their explanation short.

The TA walks away laughing at the incident, but Fitz doesn’t find it amusing.

The very next moment, they disagree how to properly collect the copper solids for weighing; mere minutes later, on how to most efficiently dispose of the corrosives. Neither of them ever backs down, and they end up having to flip a couple of (undissolved) coins to decide whose ideas to use.

He’s thankful the simplicity of this particular experiment left few opportunities for such disagreements. But it seems clear that them working together on more complicated projects outside the confines of this introductory laboratory would be a recipe for disaster.

By the time they’re collecting their copper pellets into a tared dish and getting ready to bring it to the scale, they’ve both stopped attempts at chatter. They take down the mass in their notebooks and finish recording some observations, hardly glancing at each other. Seems she’s starting to tire of being in such close quarters with him.

But when they’ve finally cleaned the last of their station, she speaks up one last time.

“I hope you don’t make a habit of being late. It’s not only your grade that’s dependent on your punctuality.”

His last lingering hope squelches out in an instant. Well, there goes that, then.

Blood boiling, he tries not to let it show she’s gotten under his skin.

“Couldn’t find the building, that’s all,” he lies, without making any assurances he’ll be on time in the future. Or even show up. He could probably take a zero on two or three labs and still pass the course. Getting an ‘A’ in everything is hardly necessary. He’ll save his best work for his engineering courses. With or without a stellar GPA, he knows he’ll get into a graduate program. Extracurricular projects alone. Not to mention the campus research he’s planning on pursuing.

Perhaps next week he won’t show at all. That’ll show her. Trying to boss him around like that.

He takes off his protective gear and shoves his things into his bag. Checking the clock up on the far wall, he sees they’ve finished with more than an hour to spare. The other students have barely begun to add their sodium hydroxide.

Well, at least she’s efficient. Intelligent, too, he supposes. More so than anyone else in the room. Probably even the undergraduate population as a whole, if he’s honest with himself. But he can’t shake the feeling this friendship simply won’t work.

The TA comes by before they can leave. Fitz still doesn’t know the bloke’s name.

“Looks like you guys make quite the team. I’ll have to come up with some extra experimentation for you two next week, since this was clearly too easy for you.”

Fitz can’t help but sigh as the TA walks away. Perhaps they should’ve dragged it out a bit more.

“Well, it was nice meeting you, Fitz.” Jemma says before either of them can leave.

Taken aback by her casual use of his last name, it takes him a moment to respond.

“Yeah,” he says, slinging his backpack on. “You too.”

Before he can duck out the door, she holds out her hand.

“See you next week?” she says, gently smiling at him like she did when she introduced herself.

He’s probably being a prat. She’s been perfectly nice since he sat down next to her. She’s just… studious. Even if they won’t be best friends, he shouldn’t go mucking up their relationship. She is an excellent lab partner, the best he could’ve hoped for. A knack for chemistry, efficient, friendly. And he should really give her some more credit, going out on a limb to make amends. Doing his best to shrug off his pessimistic first impression, he reaches for her outstretched hand.

But the moment his hand makes contact with hers, the whole bloody world stops turning. The commotion of chatter, stools screeching against the floor, and glassware clicking fades into nothing as he stares down at their joined hands, dumbfounded. His vision tunnels until it’s is all he can see; his very existence becomes tethered to her hand. He should be gasping, or screaming, but his lungs aren’t working. They’re frozen along with all the muscles in his body, including his hand.

He’s neither squeezing nor shaking her hand, but nor is he pulling away, he’s just awkwardly holding it in mid-air.

Because he can feel it.

_He. Can. Feel. It._

Her smaller, smoother hand wrapped around his, soft skin and the gentle contours of joints, warm and clammy from wearing gloves for two hours. Instantly, effortlessly activating a million dysfunctional nerve endings everywhere her skin touches. A fuzzy warmth kindles in his palm, sending phantom tingles that shouldn’t be possible halfway up his arm.

In an instant, he’s forgotten about their disagreements, his shallow irritation with her study habits and bossiness. Suddenly, all that matters is how perfectly this hand fits inside his. The fact that it’s attached to a brilliant and beautiful girl that he’s meant to spend the rest of his life with.

How much time has passed? A second? A minute?

He snaps his gaze back up to her face, trying to hold himself together.

_Don’t panic_ , he tells himself. _Stick to logic and observation. Gauge her reaction._

But all his overstimulated brain can manage to gather from her is an evident _lack_ of reaction. She doesn’t gasp, or shout, or jump up and down, like he’s seen others do when this happens.

Ward’s taunt flashes in the front of his mind again, fresh as if he just said it.

_You must be one of the mistakes._

He can’t let on what’s just happened, then. He can’t possibly tell her. A million scenarios race through his head of how that could go, the most prominent of which goes something like: _oh, you’re one of_ those _? And you think_ I’m _yours???_ Scoffing. Piteous laughter. Her running up to the TA asking to switch lab partners because hers is too weird.

Fearing the worst, instinct kicks in and he yanks his hand away as though he’s been shocked (something he actually knows intimately, working with electronics as often as he does).

She doesn’t look creeped out, at least, that he held or stared at her hand for so long. She looks mildly surprised, confused perhaps, as she lets her hand fall to her side again, but that’s all. As silent as he is, she just stares at him. It takes him far too long to realize she’s probably just waiting for him to say something in response to what she asked him.

Oh, bloody hell! He still hasn’t said anything.

What did she ask him?

His name? No. They did that already.

_See you next week?_

Right.

“Yeah,” he chokes out, his throat uncomfortably dry. “Yes,” he adds, unnecessarily.

Before he can say or do anything else stupid or revealing, he turns around and speeds for the door – as fast as he can without properly running, at any rate –  and doesn’t look back. Only once he throws open the door and is clear of the frame does he break into a run. By the time he realizes the door had slammed into the door stop, he’s already halfway down the hallway.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Woohoo! Another week, another update. I hope I can stay on such a great schedule for EP because I seriously just want to post this entire fic right now. It's seriously my second happy place and I've had such a blast writing it. 
> 
> Oh! Hopefully this chapter can quell some of the anxiety my ambiguity may have caused (if any).
> 
> Last little note: I know I'm brand new to the fandom, but feedback on this fic has been a bit scarce. I'd definitely appreciate some kind words if you're inclined to leave any!

As much as Jemma wanted to enjoy her first week at Uni, for the most part it’s been profoundly boring. By Friday, she’s finished the reading and assignments for the next two weeks, even started on projects that haven’t been assigned yet. There’s only one class where she actually learns a few things the first week: physical chemistry. Relatively speaking, it’s always been one of her weak points. 

The non-science, general education requirements on her schedule this semester have got to be the worst: world history and psychology. Two subjects that, admittedly, she hadn’t taken courses or AP exams for during her high school/community college years, too busy filling out her schedule with as many biology and biochemistry courses as she could. But in retrospect, she really should have gotten some of these out of the way early. The subject matter mostly feels like common knowledge. She’s learned everything they’ve covered so far just by visiting a couple of museums, watching the occasional documentary on National Geographic, and having bloody common sense.

Still, the most boring course of all has got to be general chemistry. Now _there’s_ a class where the syllabus contains nothing she hasn’t learned already. But the university simply wouldn’t let her transfer those particular credits from community college. What a waste.

She’s hoping her major-specific courses will pick up a bit as the semester goes on: microbiology and genetics. In fact, she’s confident they will; it just happens that the first week entails a substantial amount of review of basic biological concepts.

More than anything else about attending university, she was looking forward to the labs: a chance to apply some of the skills she’s acquired. As it’s uncommon to let prepubescent children play with caustics or BSL-II microbes, there haven’t been many appropriate settings to practice her laboratory skills. It was always her favourite part of her community college courses, so she’s positive that the absence of labs during the first week of class is contributing to her sense of disappointment.

So, going into the second week when the lab portions of her courses will finally be meeting, her hopes are still high.

Her first one of the week is Gen Chem, Tuesday afternoon. Though it’s the least stimulating science course by far, she walks into the chemistry building with purpose and optimism. Though it’s unlikely any of the concepts will be new to her, perhaps she can learn a new laboratory technique or two.

She’s the first person into the lab, aside from the TA, and she takes a seat near the front of the room, against the wall, ready to tackle whatever protocol they throw at her.

But when turns to the page in the lab manual that’s written on the whiteboard, it takes everything in her not to sigh.

_Reactions of copper._

How utterly elementary.

Still, the lab portion of the course is not optional. She pulls out one of several fresh lab notebooks from her backpack, designates it with a label for CHEM100A, and starts writing out the title, objective, and methods anyway.

The rest of the students in the section slowly trickle in as it gets closer to the class start time, and Jemma grows increasingly anxious as they all pair up with one another without hesitation. Roommates, met at orientation, knew each other in high school: whatever the backstory between the pairs may be, they all seem to already know each other. Jemma should have expected as much. Being a minor, she’s not allowed to have a roommate, but even if it weren’t against university rules, who would want to room with a teenager? And, in the same vein, who would want to have one as a lab partner? None of them know her, or the fact that she’s nothing like a typical sixteen-year-old.

She finds herself torn. On one hand, she hoping there’s an odd number of students in the class, because she’ll probably finish the experiment faster on her own. But on the other, she sort of hopes it’s an even number. Even if she has to spend all three hours in here with a chemistry amateur, perhaps she can make a friend. That’s one thing she desperately needs.

But the minute hand on the clock ticks to two, and the TA leading the lab starts his introductory spiel on laboratory safety before anyone takes the empty stool next to hers. She supposes it’s for the best.

As the TA – Jason, his name is – rambles on, Jemma’s thoughts take a turn for the worse. What if he notices she’s alone, and decides to rope her into another established group of two, turning her into the world’s worst third wheel? (Well, chemistry-wise, she’d probably get all of the work done, but socially speaking, a third wheel.)

But at eight minutes past, before she can dread such a possibility any longer, an out of sight door swings open, and someone comes stumbling in.

With all the shelves and ventilation shafts above the benches, she can’t properly see them, can only vaguely see a figure and hear their shuffling feet and panting breaths, as though they’ve been running. She wonders whether there’s an unpaired student across the lab after all, an empty seat out of her sight that the late stranger will occupy.

But the mystery person circles around to the front of the lab, heading straight for the TA in his search for an empty stool. He’s a pasty-looking bloke with short, curly hair, a striped tie in glaring contrast to the chequered shirt tucked into his kahki trousers. His fair cheeks are flushed pink, and he’s quite out of breath, presumably from running here. He looks so… young. Like he should still be in high school.

What sort of college student runs to class?

“I just finished explaining to the rest of the class,” Jason addresses the late boy. “Being more than five minutes late to a lab means you can’t participate in that lab, and you’ll have to take a zero. You’re all right for today. But starting next week, be on time or don’t come at all.”

“Yes, sir,” the boy responds, barely audible to her. She thinks she sees him roll his eyes.

“Anyone missing a partner?” Jason raises his voice, addressing the entire lab, and Jemma’s stomach sinks.

The boy pauses at the front of the lab, glancing around. Oh, brother. Like Jason hasn’t already seen her sitting by herself? Must he draw the entire section’s attention to the fact that she has no friends?

Holding her breath, she tentatively raises her hand, only just next to her face. Hoping that at least the students on the other end of the lab won’t see her, or have this introductory memory of her. The boy takes a deep breath as though he’s disappointed, and ducks his head as he hurries to the empty stool beside her.

“Excellent,” the professor exclaims. “The two young geniuses get to work together. This’ll be interesting.”

Huh? ‘Two young geniuses?’ Is he her age, after all?

Her gut instinct is to be excited. Someone else her age might be nice, an opportunity to make a friend. But right now, she can’t seem to maintain any level of excitement about the boy now approaching her. He clearly doesn’t have the same priorities. Late to the first laboratory? Rolling his eyes like he’s too good to be here? She doesn’t need a smart arse.

He slumps onto his seat, dropping his backpack so loudly it drowns out a couple of Jason’s next words. Not that it matters; she’s already written down the entire protocol and she’s well aware of both OSHA and university laboratory safety guidelines, thanks very much.

The irresponsible mystery boy rushes to catch up, scrambling to put on his coat and gloves, and pulling out a notebook and pen, scribbling down the protocol in chicken scratch. She looks away, realizing she shouldn’t care what his handwriting looks like.

It’s only a couple more minutes before Jason gives them permission to begin, and Jemma sighs while the rest of the students hastily rise to collect their materials. Her partner isn’t quite ready yet.

She supposes she should give him a second chance, though. He could have an excellent reason for being late, aside from laziness. A car accident, a sick grandfather. She should give him the benefit of the doubt. After all, she’s stuck with him for sixteen weeks now.

“I’m Jemma,” she offers with a smile. “Simmons,” she adds. Pausing his mad scribbling, he glances over at her in surprise.

“Leo,” he replies. Putting far less effort into his returning smile, he turns back to his notebook. “Fitz,” he adds.

“Right then, Leo,” she says, not caring if he’s finished or not. No time to waste. “I’ll get the reagents. You can get the other supplies.” She heads for the table at the opposite corner of the room where their reagents have been pre-prepared without giving him time to respond.  

It’s one of the hardest things she’s ever done, watching these technically-adults try to use the safety pump on the nitric acid. She barely stops one of them from using the same pipet for sodium hydroxide as sulphuric acid, and another from diluting their acid solution by adding water to it. “Acid to water, never water to acid!” she can’t help but shout, and it captures the attention of the roaming TA. As Jason approaches to give the hapless student a repeat lecture on safe practices for corrosives, Jemma seizes her window to access the reagent bottles she needs.

When she returns to the other end of the room, Leo already has a pre-1982 penny, a hot plate, a crucible, and extra glassware set up in their fume hood. She’s not sure how he found everything so quickly. He missed the walkthrough of where each of the items were located in the lab.

“Found everything all right, then?” she asks.

“Hard to misplace a hot plate,” he quips.

Oh. He’s Scottish, then.

In an instant, she finds her heart softening to him a bit. It was not easy transferring here during high school, and she can’t help but wonder whether he just moved here. His accent seems unmistakeable now. She doesn’t know how she didn’t notice it before. Not expecting it, she supposes. She can’t remember ever meeting a Scottish person since she moved to America. Assuming he was American, she thought he just had an unusual pronunciation of his name. But glancing over at his now-closed notebook resting on the lip of the hood, she sees ‘Leo Fitz’ and finds herself thinking it’s a bit cute. Fitz.

Her curiosity gets the better of her.

“Not from around here, I’m guessing?” she asks as she places the penny in one of the beakers he got.

“Glasgow,” he answers, pouring the correct volume reagent into the beaker without being prompted, with neither a splash nor a dribble.

“Sheffield,” she volunteers, spirits lifted that so far he’s not completely incompetent at chemistry.

He’s not terribly talkative yet, and she’s not sure whether to chalk it up to nerves or an ego. But she can’t help trying to engaging him a little more; it’d be so nice to have a friend her age.

“What’s your opinion of America so far?” she ventures as they watch their penny dissolve.

“Lives up to the stereotypes.”

She chuckles. She could say the same thing.

Still, it’s not the detailed answer she’d hoped for. There’s got to be some way to get this boy to talk, but she’s not sure how to find it out. She surreptitiously looks to his backpack and the lanyard sitting at his station, but they’re both utterly plain and black, no stickers or themes to be found. She’s starting to second guess whether she wants to be friends with him at all.

To her surprise, after the following step, he asks her a question.

“When’d you move here?”

“About three years ago, now.”

“Hmm. Me too.” As though it’s a trivial thing, immigrating to a new country.

“Though we didn’t move here, specifically to New Jersey, I mean,” she qualifies. “My parents are in Los Angeles.”

“Ah,” Fitz nods. “Yeah, my... my mum, she’s in New York.”

“How old are you?” she asks, since the can of worms has been opened now.

“Sixteen,” he says, shrugging just slightly like he’s a bit proud of himself.

“Seriously?” she asks, not able to help herself from beaming at him a bit.

“Seriously.” He nods.

“I am too,” she says. “Couldn’t stand another day of high school,” she adds.

He chuckles a bit, at that. And though she doesn’t understand why, Jemma finds herself quite happy she’s at least capable of making him laugh.

They’re both quiet as they carry on the next step of the experiment. Jemma is more impressed by the minute at Fitz’s knack for chemistry. She doesn’t know if she could’ve asked for a better partner. Despite being late and having hardly any time to read the manual, he seems to have memorized the protocol. He helps her setup each new step before she has to ask.

“What’s your major?” she asks, trying to sound as casual as possible, if only because she doesn’t want to seem desperate for someone to talk to.

“Engineering.”

Of course. A numbers bloke. It’s all math and physics to them, it’s no wonder he can barely hold a conversation.

“Biochem,” she counters, without prompting.

Despite their mismatched fields of study, they work surprisingly well together. Still, worried they may not have much curriculum in common outside this wretched lab, she narrows her inquiries into ones strictly related to it.

“When are Dr. White’s office hours, again?” she asks. Just to get the ball rolling.

“Er… I dunno,” he responds, looking at her like she’s mad for asking. “Isn’t that in the syllabus?”

She tries a different avenue a few minutes later.

“Have you done the textbook readings yet?” He probably doesn’t need to read it, from the looks of it, but perhaps they can discuss how easy this course is together. Have a laugh at the first chapter of the text explaining the properties of water.

It takes him a moment to answer. “I’ve sort of been busy with other classes, actually.”

Jemma is growing frustrated. The more she tries to engage with him, the more he seems like a self-absorbed knob.

“Yeah,” she says, nodding along. “Me too.” In an attempt to salvage her dignity, she adds: “Never know what could show up on an exam, though.”

Discouraged, she decides to makes one final school-related attempt.

“Have you been to the library yet? Or logged onto the online database? There’s more journal subscriptions than I could ever read. Molecular biology, physiology, pharmacology… and I know they’ve got lots of engineering ones, too.”

“I’ve been meaning to but, not yet.” He pauses, taking a deep breath. “The truth is, I spend most of my free time working on projects of my own.”

“Really?” Whether or not he meant it, she interprets it as him throwing her a bone. “Like what?”

“Well, right now I’m working on this sort of, drone. It’s multifunctional. Designed to gather intel in places that are too dangerous for humans. Contamination sites, outer space, that sort of thing.”

Here it is. This is what will get him talking. She should’ve led with this, asking him about machines and things. She hasn’t heard him string together sentences like this the entire hour and a half she’s been by his side. And more than that: as he’s pouring sodium hydroxide and outlining the functions he has planned for his drone, she realizes he’s smiling as he does it. Properly smiling. She should steer the conversation toward engineering more often. His smile is quite lovely. And he’s clearly passionate about this project, and that’s something she can relate to. Perhaps their friendship isn’t doomed after all.

“Sounds fascinating,” she offers. “And you do that all on your own?”

“For the most part, yeah.”

He reciprocates by asking what sort of projects she’s been involved in for biochemistry. She decides to tell him about the pharmaceutical internship she did before she arrived here. She leaves out the fact that, due to her age and inexperience, she was not allowed to directly conduct any experiments and was instead responsible for dishes and paperwork, thinking the genius doesn’t need to know. It’s not quite fair, after all. The only reasons she doesn’t have a side project of her own at the moment are logistical in nature. It’s not as easy for a biochemist to keep their own experiments, unless she wants to go capture some animals and keep them in her dorm. Or grow a garden inside of it.

But just then, Jason walks up behind them and asks where they’re at.

“We’ve just finished precipitating the copper metal –” Jemma begins.

“We’re just about to dry the sample –” Leo begins at the same time. They glare over at each other, but neither truncates their sentence.

Jason merely laughs, and continues his rounds.

They can’t agree on how to collect the copper solids, either. They both want to go off-protocol for increased accuracy, but disagree on how. They end up flipping a second (undissolved) penny, and Jemma loses.

Jemma is starting to think it’d be a terrible idea for them to work together on anything outside the confines of this painfully easy laboratory. With more complicated problems, they’d surely find even bigger things to squabble about.

They finish up fairly quickly after that, without any more small-talk. They record the mass of their copper and turn in the carbon copies of their methods and observations.

But once again, they disagree on how to dispose of their leftover acids and bases. He wants to walk them over to the corrosive waste storage; she wants to neutralize them and place them in the general non-halogenated waste bin.

At least this time, Jemma wins the coin toss.

Once they’ve finished cleaning up, Jemma remembers the beginning of the lab. The fact that he walked in eight minutes late, and Jason’s stern reminder about not being able to participate in the future.

“I hope you don’t make a habit of being late,” she warns Leo, trying to sound stern. “It’s not only your grade that’s dependent on your punctuality.” She might be coming off a bit rude at this point, but she doesn’t care as much as she should. He’s been a bit rude on a few occasions already.

“Couldn’t find the building, that’s all,” he mumbles through his teeth, his face slowly going red.

It’s absolutely not the excellent excuse she anticipated, and Jemma isn’t pleased that he hasn’t given her any assurance he won’t be late in the future.

Still, as they take off their PPE and pack up their things, she starts to feel guilty about her brusqueness. She does have to spend dozens more hours with him in here, and he’s far from the worst lab partner she could have. He’s very clever, at least, and they completed the experiment without any errors or holdups.

“Looks like you guys make quite the team,” Jason says, coming up behind them by surprise again. “I’ll have to come up with some extra experimentation for you two next week, since this was clearly too easy for you.”

She definitely hears Leo sigh.

Jemma can’t let them leave them off like this.

“Well, it was nice meeting you, Fitz,” she says before either of them can leave.

It’s too late when she realizes she called him ‘Fitz’ instead of ‘Leo.’ He doesn’t comment on her fixation with his last name, and she’s too embarrassed to acknowledge the slip-up and correct herself.

“Yeah,” he says, slinging his backpack on. “You too.”

Before he can turn away, she holds out her hand in a gesture of goodwill. An olive branch.

“See you next week?” she says, gently smiling at him.

For a moment he’s frozen with surprise, just staring down at her hand. But eventually he reaches for her extended hand with an equally apologetic smile, almost as though he realizes they’ve both cocked it up a bit.

But as soon as his hand touches hers, she forgets about all that. Him stumbling in late, their disagreements, his thinly veiled irritation with her questions. Because this is not like any other handshake she’s ever had – a vague pressure deep under her skin to indicate the other person has squeezed her hand sufficiently hard.

This is so much more than that.

A million dead neurons resurrect beneath his hesitant touch, flooding her brain with signals it’s not nearly prepared to receive. Callouses on his palms from working with his hands too much, the layer of slick moisture coating their hands from hours of wearing gloves. Every individual metacarpophalangeal joint pressing into her palm, the whispers of hairs on the back of his hand against the pad of her thumb. The extra strength tucked away in his larger, thicker grip that really only comes from having ten times the circulating testosterone.

It’s him.

Oh, God, it’s _him._

It doesn’t matter that he’s a reticent engineer, that he was late or that they seem to love to annoy and interrupt each other. Suddenly all that matters to Jemma is that this endearingly pasty hand feels like it was meant for hers. That this clever, slightly grumpy, painfully quiet boy is the soulmate she’s spent her life waiting for. The boy she’s supposed to be with forever.

She realizes she’s still staring down at their linked hands, and that this conciliatory handshake has gone on far too long. She glances back up to his face, to find him staring blankly down at her hand, too. When he meets her eyes it’s only a fraction of a second later, but it feels like a lifetime.

 _Okay. Don’t panic,_ she tells herself. _Assess the situation._

But he doesn’t look like he’s just experienced what she has. She’s heard stories, watched films, even seen it with her own eyes a handful of times. There’s almost always shouting, squealing of some kind. But Fitz – damn it, _Leo_ – is silent.

Suddenly, he yanks his hand away.

She inhales sharply at the rush of friction across her skin, sending zings all the way up her arm.

Paralysed with shock, all she can do is watch Fitz as his expression turns grave, like he’s both confused and disturbed by this lengthy episode of physical contact.

An image of Uncle Jeff still in tears over Aunt Emily six months after she’d left flashes in her mind.

This can’t be a match, either.

Tears welling up in her eyes, Jemma quickly concludes she can’t let on what’s just happened. He’d transfer himself to a different lab section in an instant if he found out.

But before she can figure out a way to improvise a professional farewell, he gives her a quick mumbled affirmative to whatever she’d asked (what was it???) and practically leaves skid marks on the linoleum as he turns around to head for the nearest exit door. In what seems like a fraction of a second, the door is slamming into its stopper and he’s out of sight.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you new readers for your feedback, I appreciate it immensely! I hope you continue to enjoy it. Let the pining begin ;)

As Fitz desperately searches for an escape route, he finds himself glancing behind him almost compulsively. Whether it’s because he wonders if Jemma will follow him, or or just worried she’ll see him barrelling down the hallway as she goes her own way and think he’s a total madman, he isn’t sure. A bit of both, perhaps. But regardless, she doesn’t appear. Doesn’t exit the lab at all.

Just before he reaches the stairwell that led him to this floor, he comes upon a water closet.

 _Men’s_ room: she can’t possibly follow him in here.

He barges inside and, finding it apparently empty, he drops his backpack on the floor and buckles over at the waist, letting out a hopeless groan. His stomach turns as he plays it over in his mind, the high of that fateful touch, the inevitable crash of discovering her empty expression. He wonders whether he should duck into a stall in case he actually does throw up.

Instead, he approaches the nearest sink, confronting his reflection in the above mirror. He’s almost surprised to see the same bloke that he saw in the loo this morning as he brushed his teeth, because he doesn’t feel remotely like the same person.

With heavy, jagged breaths, he holds up his right hand, staring at it in horror.

Needing concrete evidence he hasn’t hallucinated the whole thing, he makes a fist with his left hand. He can tell it’s in a fist – proprioceptors are telling his brain that, and he can see it – but he can’t feel it any more than he could an hour ago.

Taking a deep breath, he makes a fist with his right. Lined with a slick layer of sweat, his fingers slide over textured lines of his palm as they curl against it. Squeezing harder, he feels his skin pulling taut around his knuckles, his fingernails cutting into his palm.

“Oh, God.” The words escape his chest in a dry sob as the reality of what’s happened crashes down on him. He repeats the phrase over and over for lack of a real solution, not caring that he’s sounding more and more insane with each one.

This actually happened.

Well, of course it did. Even standing here, doing nothing, he can feel the bloody stagnant air around his hand.

Pulling back the sleeve on his right arm just a tad, he opens his hand and brings his left index finger up to meet it, lightly dragging it across his palm.

It sends a pleasant, warm shiver through his hand, and by extension, down his spine. He leaps into the air with a gasp, shaking out his hand like he’s been shocked. Pulse racing in his ears, blood rushing into his cheeks.

No one ever said he’d be _this_ sensitive!

“ _What_ the _hell_!”

He continues shaking out his hand, trying to pretend it didn’t feel as good as it did. How creepy is that, getting pleasure from touching your own hand? Bloody hell, though, it felt good. There’s still a distinct, tingly line across his palm where his finger touched.

Feeling too overwhelmed to support his own weight, he grips onto the sides of the sink, only to stumble back again when it’s cold and hard against his right hand like nothing he’s ever experienced.

Stopping once he’s a few feet away, he realizes he’s nearly hyperventilating at this point. If he keeps this up, he’ll be passed out on the questionably clean floor in here in a minute. Resting his arms on top of his head, he tries to control his breathing, at least. To inhale and exhale with some regularity. He splays his fingers and holds his hand out to his side awkwardly so he doesn’t accidentally touch anything else before he’s prepared.

But a short moment later, he hears some shoes skidding on the tile. A tap, tapping sound he can’t quite identify.

Uh oh.

A toilet flushes, and Fitz whirls around to find the large, accessible stall (which he presumed empty) clicking and opening. A college-aged bloke on crutches and a knee-length cast hops through the now-open door, his face screwed up with a suspicious sort of disgust.

“You all right, man?” he asks, eyeing Fitz up and down.

“Yeah,” Fitz rushes out with a nod. His voice cracks in the middle of the word, and it really doesn’t help him make a convincing case that he isn’t too young to possibly belong here. The noise he just made was bloody pubescent.

The bloke hobbles to the adjacent sink to wash his hands, and Fitz does his best to breathe normally and not let his wobbly legs give out while he has an audience.

By the time the bloke finally leaves, Fitz has been sufficiently embarrassed into some semblance of composure.

Composure enough to begin to apply some logic to this mess. To figure out a way to climb out of this massive ditch he’s fallen into.

Okay, first thing’s first: list the givens. Can’t solve even the simplest problem without knowing the givens.

Here’s what he knows:

1) His limited knowledge of physiology tells him the hands have among the most concentrated nerve endings. He’s probably not a total freak for reacting so strongly, and it likely won’t be as intense everywhere else.

2) That is assuming he ever acquires touch anywhere else. That would require subsequent contact with Jemma Simmons, which he has no guarantee will happen.

3) Oh, yeah: Jemma Simmons is his soulmate.

4) He’s probably not hers.

Despite the fact that he’s got a handful of new active neurons currently going haywire with overstimulation, he thinks it’s actually number four that’s giving him the most trouble.

He thought he was above this, lending any credence to the possibility of a matching soulmate. He thought he didn’t care. Knowing it was all too possible – likely, even, for him – that whoever his soulmate ended up being (if anyone) wouldn’t match up with him, he was making the safe, logical choice by reining himself in. Or so he thought.

But somewhere, deep down, he must have been holding out for a match, after all. He wouldn’t feel so crushed by this outcome if he hadn’t. And right now he hates himself for it.

Suddenly it feels as though the floor’s been pulled out from under him. Head spinning, he covers his face with his normal, still-numb hand, letting out a shaky breath.

Okay. One thing at a time.

He’s not _certain_ that he’s not her soulmate. It’s simply the default position he’s taken. As a scientist, he’s been trained to always assume the null hypothesis to be true unless he has sufficient evidence to reject it. In this case, that means assuming he is _not_ Jemma’s soulmate.

But how does one go about rejecting this sort of null? There are no concrete tests to run, no data to analyse. She didn’t react the way he might expect if he were her soulmate; but to be fair, he didn’t either. And she did seem slightly taken aback, even surprised. There’s a tiny possibility he’s wrong. He desperately wants to cling to that possibility, but is it foolish to have such a hope? Will it only lead to him being exponentially more crushed later on, if he finds out with certainty that he isn’t?

But whether or not he has any hope is irrelevant: he has to find out for certain. He can’t carry on being her lab partner, or seeing her in any context, without getting an answer. If he is her soulmate, they can progress forward with that knowledge. If she isn’t, things could go two ways from there. If she doesn’t have a soulmate at all, things could still work. Maybe. If he doesn’t get too clingy or try to push anything romantic on her. And if she does have one, and it isn’t him, well… that’s when he’ll run the other direction. He’ll have to, for his own wellbeing. But this – being plagued with this ambiguity – is already unbearable, and it’s been mere minutes since he left her presence.

Fitz nearly doubles over again. The more he thinks about this, the more his stomach drops, and his pathetically pierced heart creeps up into his throat.

He didn’t ask for this. He never wanted a soulmate, he’s always said that. He doesn’t have time for one. Time or the desire. He never longed for something he couldn’t understand.

But now he’s had a taste of it, a glorious taste of what it’s like to feel, and he desperately wants more. He wants Jemma to touch him again.

He wants to hold her hand again. He’d like to do it forever, in fact.

He is so screwed.

Overwhelmed, Fitz lets out a hopeless groan that echoes jarringly off the tile walls.

He’s got to talk to someone.

Instinctively, he pulls his phone out of his pocket (with his left hand), and awkwardly mashes out a text to the first person who pops into his head: Mack.

_mack._

_I met her._

Not wanting to sound mad, he leaves it short. He’ll understand what it means.

But when Mack doesn’t respond straight away, Fitz isn’t sure what to do. He could phone his mum, but she’d probably just pressure him to pursue Jemma. And it’s unlikely she’d understand, anyway, since she hasn’t been through this.

Then again, neither has Mack. But he has to tell someone. He feels fit to burst.

While he’s waiting for Mack to text back, he works on his breathing again. And decides a good distraction to the uncertainty settling like an anchor in his gut will be to experiment with his newly acquired fifth sense.

Hesitantly, he closes the distance between himself and the sink, reaches down slowly with his right hand. The first couple times, the anticipation gets the better of him and he pulls his hand back too soon. But the third time, his fingertips make contact with the ceramic, and he stills his hand for a moment, lingering there. Trying to get used to the flood of signals. Steeling himself as best as he can, he flattens his palm against it, running his hand along the side. All while holding his breath so he doesn’t gasp like a little boy again.

Various physical properties of ceramic run through his mind, and he tries to match them up with the information coming from his hand. Of all the adjectives he can define, there’s only a few he feels confident enough to assign to the sink. Nonetheless, he focuses on newly cataloguing them his head, pairing them with the unique sensations in his hand. For a few moments, at least, it keeps him from spiralling into an anxiety attack over his fate with Jemma. Dense, cool, polished... slippery even, beneath his damp skin.

He clutches at the fabric of his shirt, next, starchy cotton, hard circular plastic buttons. Rubs the fabric of his tie between his thumb and index finger. That’s his favourite so far, aside from Jemma’s hand. Silky. It’s a good one, as far as textures go.

But even doing these simple exercises, his heart is racing again. His hand is getting sweatier by the second. Needing a break from the sheer sensory overload, he lets his arm fall to his side again, still trying to process the last few objects. He resists the urge to wipe his damp hand on his trousers, knowing that would be too much for him to handle.

How do ordinary people cope with this?

He supposes it’ll eventually fade. Desensitisation occurs with auditory and olfactory receptors, and he knows it to be true of mechanoreceptors as well, even if he’s yet to experience it first-hand. He just hopes that happens quickly. He’ll be found out by his peers – or worse, by Jemma – if he’s constantly thrown into a frenzy by every new thing he touches.

Well, he doesn’t have a research proposal for the whole is-he-Jemma’s-soulmate-or-not question, but there is at least a way to avoid outing himself in such a way. He simply has to desensitise his hand a bit. Expose himself to common substances to avoid surprises.

With an objective and a method to achieve it in mind, he suddenly feels a bit less overwhelmed.

Still, if he’s going to confront the world with a brand-new sense, he’s going to need some fresh air. Scooping up his bag from the floor, he hurries out of the claustrophobic loo before he can change his mind.

 

\-----

 

The laboratory door slowly closes itself behind Fitz, but for a while all Jemma is stare numbly at his exit route. She considers going after him, because he’s her bloody soulmate and he can’t have gotten far, but she’s frozen on her feet.

When enough of the shock has warn off to reverse the temporary paralysis, the first thing to move is her newly cursed right hand. Air swishes softly over her skin as she wriggles her fingers. She lifts it up next to her face, staring at it in disbelief. Tentatively, she raises her left hand up to the same level, lightly brushing her thumb over her palm. Just as when Fitz’s hand made contact, the path where her thumb touches explodes with sensation. Delicate friction, the texture of the ridges on the pad of her thumb, the light tug on her skin as she drags along the surface. Thousands of tiny little neurons are triggered in its path, leaving a pleasant electric hum in a distinct line across her palm. A warm, tingling sensation reverberates up her arm, all the way to the back of her neck, making her shiver involuntarily.

With a startled gasp, she pulls her hand out of her thumb’s reach, lightly shaking out her hand to try to stop the foreign fuzzy feelings.

Bloody hell, that felt _good_. Too good. Why did it feel that good??

And it may as well have someone else touching her – because her thumb didn’t feel any of that. It’s no more responsive than it was five minutes ago.

After giving herself a few moments to recover, and prepare herself for further onslaught, she continues to lightly stroke her right hand with her thumb, mapping out the exact shape of where Fitz’s hand had been. The precise outline of where his larger fingers and thumb had curled around her smaller hand, instantly forging a divide between dysfunctional and newly functional neurons.

It’s only when a classmate at the hood adjacent to theirs asks her if she’s all right that Jemma realizes there are tears streaming down her face.

Without answering their question, she picks up her bag and dashes out of the lab.

She doesn’t stop running until she gets back to her dorm. Exerting effort makes it much harder to think, which is good. She’s certain to drive herself mad as soon as she starts thinking of the repercussions of what just happened.

As soon as she’s within the safety of her own room, she pulls out her phone, only to drop it on the floor when she’s bombarded with the textures of her trousers, the plastic and glass of her phone case. Letting out a groan of frustration, she picks it up with her still-comatose left hand, and texts Daisy to call her as soon as she gets this message. It takes her longer than usual, using only one thumb, but for now, it’s better than being overwhelmed by the bloody screen.

Switching her phone to ‘loud’ and tossing it onto her bed, she slumps against the wall, sinking to the floor and wrapping her arms around her knees. Careful to avoid brushing her hand against anything.

If having her world turned upside down in an instant wasn’t enough to take her breath away, running half a mile certainly is. Now that she has a moment to assess her physiology, it becomes evident that her chest is heaving, her vision getting a bit spotty. She’s hyperventilating. Knowing it’ll do her no good to pass out on the floor of her room, she tries to focus on calming herself down. Rests her head back against the wall and tries to slow her out of control, ragged breaths to a somewhat normal rhythm.

Oh, God, it’s him. It’s _him_. Of _course_ it had to be him.

As much as she’s always tried to pretend she wasn’t, she’s always been fascinated at the idea of meeting her soulmate. Just too frightened to actually hope she ever would. But somewhere in the back of her mind, she always hoped that if she ever did meet them, they would reveal themselves to her straight away. She’d always had a bad feeling that when (or if) the time ever came, she would be too nervous to do it first.

It turns out, she was right. Her soulmate blundered into her life without a moment’s warning, and as predicted, she completely froze up. Couldn’t find the courage to tell him in the short span of time before he disappeared.  

Uncle Jeff had always told her not to be afraid, to just come out with it, if it ever happened. The man was determined not to let his misfortune affect any of his nieces of nephews.

But how could she not be? Jemma is a scientist. She strives to make decisions not based on her gut, as people tend to do, but based on evidence. And the evidence suggests that mismatching is common enough to warrant caution, if not fear. The memories of her uncle’s encounter merely made that evidence more tangible. Or so she’s convinced herself.

But now she’s in the same position he was, isn’t she? Fitz exhibited none of the typical responses she’d come to anticipate from someone who’s just touched their soulmate for the first time.

But then, neither did she.

It was odd the way he rushed out of there so fast; but he had run _into_ class, so it wasn’t unreasonable he’d also run out. And it seems social interaction isn’t exactly something Fitz excels at.

If there’s one thing Jemma hates, it’s uncertainty. Accepting the hypothesis that she is Fitz’s soulmate, too, would require sufficient evidence that revolves around Fitz himself. The amount of evidence she currently has is unquestionably insufficient, but _he_ is the biggest dependent variable here. She can’t figure out anything for certain without him present. Testing this hypothesis immediately is out of the question, and until she can collect more data, it’s neither safe nor logical to assume she is his soulmate. Scientifically speaking, she has no choice but to assume the opposite: the null hypothesis that she is not.

But Jemma has to admit, it’s difficult for her to remain as objective as she needs to be for scientific investigation when she’s this fraught with emotion. When her heart is begging her to have some hope, whether or not it aligns with scientific reason.

Anger suddenly flashes through her system. She didn’t come to university to meet her bloody soulmate, to have a chance encounter that turned her life upside down whether she wanted it to or not. The entire concept seems predicated on an utter lack of both consent and logic.

But she’s stuck now. It’s happened.

And she can stomp around and be furious all day, convince herself this is merely an untimely interruption in her busy academic schedule. She can spend the next week before she sees him again pretending she doesn’t care whether she’s Fitz’s soulmate, pretending it doesn’t matter.

But she’d be unequivocally lying to herself. Stupid though she knows it to be, a single desire has overtaken her thoughts in the minutes since she left his presence. She wants, desperately, to be the girl Fitz is destined for. She wants to spend every waking moment of the foreseeable future learning everything there is to know about him. She wants him to touch her again. The boy who, merely an hour earlier, she was on the threshold of disliking. Could list of a list of reasons why, in fact.

It just had to be Fitz, didn’t it?

She has a sinking feeling, deep down, that he’s not her match. But a feeling isn’t enough. She needs concrete evidence or she’ll never be able to move on.

The thought of _moving on_ sends a sharp stab of pain through her pathetic heart, and she could just slap herself for it.

Knowing it was such a real possibility to be mismatched, Jemma had done everything she could to prepare herself for such an outcome. More importantly, she never dared to hope that she’d find some mythical happily ever after. Mostly because she didn’t _need_ one. She planned on making a difference in the world, and romantic relationships seemed only to hinder one’s career. At least, such seemed to be the case for women. She was perfectly content – eager, even – to dedicate her life to science rather than men.

But now there are feelings in her chest as unfamiliar as they are absurd – butterflies and yearning and a nagging sense she’s suddenly incomplete. Now she’s fantasising what it’d be like to discover she and Fitz are a match made in the cosmos, after all.

 _No!_ she reprimands herself. She can’t go there. Not now. Not yet.

To stop herself from daydreaming about her unwitting soulmate anymore, she busies herself with another pressing matter – the newly functioning synapses in her right hand.

She slowly uncurls herself from the ball she’s in, and carefully lowers her right hand until it’s gently resting on her jeans. Slowly, she curls her fingers, getting a sense of the fabric: its uneven texture, the fact that it wicks away the moisture from her sweaty palm. She reaches her hand down to the rug, next, burying her fingers in it, feeling the thick fibres brush along her fingers but unable to put words to the unique texture in her mind. It’s only a second before she has to pull her hand away, alarmed by the intensity of the sensations.

Before she can stop them, tears are rolling gently down her cheeks again. Silently mourning the fact that she’s spent her whole life missing this vital physiological function. The fact that she’s enduring this sensory overload alone when she’s meant to be sharing it with someone. With Fitz.

Someone taps lightly on her open door, startling Jemma enough that she flinches hard, hitting her elbow against the wall.

Turning toward the door, she sees her RA standing hesitantly in the frame. Jemma throws her left hand over her heart, relieved. Hastily wiping her face with her jumper, she stands up to greet her.

“Hi, May,” she says, sniffling and trying to sober up. “What’s up?” All Jemma can seem to offer is a weak smile.

“I just heard…” May takes in her expression, no doubt seeing red blotches all over her face. “Are you okay?”

May doesn’t exactly _look_ concerned; instead, her features are hard as if she might be angry that Jemma was crying. But Jemma learned early on that May’s solemn looks are deceiving. All the evidence thus far suggests that she cares about Jemma’s wellbeing: she’d been the nicest one here on her first day of orientation. Told her she could come to her with anything, school-related or not.

Before Jemma can answer, her phone blares from where she tossed it on her bed.

“I’m okay,” she lies. “I’m so sorry, I’ve got to get this.” She points to her phone. It’s more important to talk to Daisy first. She can go to May later, if she’s still available.

May simply nods, and leaves her in peace.

Jemma snatches her phone up off her bed with her left hand. Awkward though it is, she’s not ready to freely utilise her right hand yet.

“Daisy?” she answers, surprised by how distraught she sounds.

“Jemma, what’s wrong? Your text sounded urgent.”

“Oh, Daisy, it’s him. I _met_ _him_.”

“ _What_!? Are you serious?”

“Deadly serious, I’m afraid.”

“What was it like?”

“Would you even understand if I told you?”

Daisy is quiet for a beat. “No. But you still can.”

“I don’t really know how to describe it. It’s like nothing I’ve felt before.”

“How’d it happen?”

“He’s my lab partner in chemistry. We shook hands.”

“Ohhh.” A pause. “Is he cute?”

Jemma thinks about that for a moment, but can’t seem to come up with a definitive answer. She shakes her head, angry with herself for not knowing.

“I dunno.” At first sight, she hadn’t been memorably impressed with his appearance. But when has she ever been upon first meeting someone? It’s so hard to remember his face in clear detail. He was pale, had curly hair, boyish cheeks. But he was wearing goggles for much of the time, and they’d spent much of the two hours staring at their experiment’s progress, rather than each other. Not to mention, right now all she can think about is how sinfully good it felt to touch his hand. “Maybe.”

“Wow. Control your thirst, Jemma.”

She lets out a humourless chuckle.

“Well, what did you both say when you found out?” Daisy prods.

“See, that’s the thing, Dais…” The imminent rejection crashes down on her again, and she swallows down a lump in her throat. “We didn’t.”

“You _what_?”

“I was too nervous!” she tries to defend herself. “You know I’ve always been scared I’d be mismatched!”

“Yeah, but, Jemma…”

“If he’s not my proper match, it’ll crush me. I wish I could say it wouldn’t but…”

“Okay, it’s okay. We’re gonna figure this out. I’m gonna help you figure this out. Okay?”

She takes in a shaky breath, and nods. “Okay.”

“Why don’t you start at the beginning?”

Jemma does exactly that, telling Daisy about him showing up late, working together, the handshake, the way he ran off before she could say anything (not that she was ready to).

“He _ran_ off?” she asks.

“Sort of, yeah.”

“Think maybe he was just as freaked out as you were by what happened?”

She had considered it, briefly. But hoping for such an event would be foolish.

“Don’t get my hopes up, Daisy.”

“Okay. Sorry.” She lets out a sigh. “You have to find out, though. You can’t go on like this.”

“I know.”

“I’m guessing you won’t just come out and tell him?’’

“Not an option,” Jemma confirms.

“Well, you’re going to have to get it out of him some other way then. You’ll be spending a couple hours with him every week, right? Eventually it’ll come up.”

“Will it?” she asks, not optimistic.

“I’m not really sure what else you could do.”

“You’re right. It’s probably my best option.”

“Please let me know?”

“Of course.”

“And Jemma, even if he isn’t, it’s gonna be okay. You’ll still have me.”

“’Til you meet yours.”

“Don’t even joke about that.”

Jemma genuinely smiles for the first time since she left that lab. “’Kay.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Back with another update! I ended up making this one longer than I'd planned, as reward for the long-ish wait. Hope you guys enjoy :) Because man, I certainly do. This story brings joy to my heart whenever I come back to it.

By the end of his last class on Wednesday, Fitz has amassed a sizeable inventory of tactile memories. Paired them up with physical properties and adjectives he’s never understood before now. Metal, glass, paper, plastic, wood, nitrile. He tries to think of every possible material he might encounter in next week’s lab and desensitise himself to it, so as not to draw unnecessary attention from Jemma. He knows he eventually has to come clean, but he doesn’t want it to be by accident.

He’s met about a dozen new people over the span of a day: other members of his suite, professors, classmates he’s been forced to work in groups with. And as he’s shaken all their hands, he’s been consistently amazed by how different everyone’s is. Some are unpleasantly moist; others are uncomfortably dry. Some squeeze hard, other barely hold on. Some hands feel massive around his, others are dwarfed by his own. Some have soft hands, others have rough calloused skin he wonders how they cope with. It’s funny, how he can start to make assumptions about the people he meets simply based on their handshake. How confident they are, how muscular, how often they use their hands, whether they have a skincare routine. A useful tool for the future, he speculates, that he’s almost glad to have acquired.

But there’s only one hand he keeps going back to, one he daydreams about touching again. Because only one changed his life forever: Jemma’s. Hers was the nicest of all.

In fact, that little hand has consumed roughly ninety percent of his waking thoughts since he walked out of that lab. Well, that hand and the person attached to it.

The lecture for their chemistry class meets tomorrow morning, and he’s already vowed to himself to try to find her. Being introductory level as it is, an important prerequisite for multiple programs, it’s a huge class. More than three hundred students. Trying to locate someone specific to sit next to without prior coordination may be near impossible.

But his only ill-formed plan as of right now, that Mack helped him formulate, is to get to know Jemma better. His only hope is that, perhaps, if they’re friends, finding out the truth about him won’t be as revolting to her (worse case scenario; best case scenario, maybe she’ll be flattered). And the more time he spends with her outside of their lab section, the quicker he can get to know her, and vice versa. The sooner he can get the answer he needs.

Though, he has no idea what he’ll do if he does find her tomorrow. Simply stare at her from afar? Approach her and hope he doesn’t trip over his own tongue? Sit next to her and pray he can restrain himself from touching her the entire fifty minutes?

He spends the evening worrying about how it will play out as he repeatedly copies down the derivations of the equations he learned in Mechatronics today. Trying to memorize them early. But his wandering thoughts are distracting enough that it takes him much longer than it should. He keeps writing the wrong symbols, forgetting how to do basic integration.

When he finally gives up for the night and climbs into bed, he faces a night just as sleepless as the last. Tossing and turning, seeing Jemma’s face behind his eyelids. It’s a hazy memory, at this point, so many hours have passed since he’s seen her. He vows to himself the next time he sees her he’ll pay closer attention to her features, devote the details to memory.

He finally falls asleep in the wee hours of the morning, dreaming of what it’d be like to touch her again.

But his worry turns out to be for naught.

He does arrive early enough to spot her (he knew she’d be the type to show up ten minutes early), but completely loses his nerve when he sees her. She’s unmistakeable there in the front row, both a laptop and a notebook on her tiny retractable desk, intently focused on the former. There’s a few dozen students inside already, but a myriad empty seats. Including all the ones next to her. He’s entered at the very back (and top) of the large lecture hall, and he’s totally out of her line of vision, for now. He could walk down the steps and wait for her to see him.

He imagines how she’d look over and smile at him, inviting him to sit next to her. Or… what if she simply rolls her eyes, disappointed that he’d not leave her alone here, either?

In that moment, she turns in her chair, as though she’s about to look behind her. With the way the air evacuates his lungs at the idea of her seeing him, he’s no longer uncertain if he’s brave enough to approach her. He _definitely_ isn’t. Heart sinking into his shoes, he looks down to the floor, settling into his usual chair in the back right of the hall instead.

He clenches his fists and mentally kicks himself for chickening out. Fighting the urge to look up.

He doesn’t even know for certain whether Jemma did look up toward the back. But if she did see him, she pretended not to.

Perhaps it’s for the best, then.

 

\-----

 

Encouraged by her conversation with Daisy, Jemma makes it her mission to put Fitz out of her mind. Temporarily. He’s not going anywhere, after all. She’ll see him next week in the lab, where she can put her plan to form a friendship into action. And until then, there’s nothing she can do. Instead, she decides to go on an excursion to break in her new sense. Can’t be giving herself away to everyone around her after all (least of all Fitz).

She wanders around campus with her notepad and phone, touching everything she can get her hand on and trying to match it to descriptions she can find online.

_Grass_ , she punches into Google. Coarse, scratchy, springy. She has too look up definitions for each tactile adjective, and get a sense of how each one translates on her fingertips. But the investigation is well worth her time. This is a whole new way of interacting with the world, and Jemma can’t contain her curiosity.

_Polystyrene_. Flexible and spongy, yet brittle. She tears off a few pieces of the coffee cup, finally matching a sensation to how it squeaks and rips.

But it isn’t long before she has to admit she’s spectacularly failing her mission. All she can think about is Fitz.

_Cement_. Hard, dense.

_What’s he doing right now?_ Inventing something, probably. Or maybe he’s still in class, that serious focused face on as he scribbles messy equations down. Or perhaps he’s rolling his eyes at another student he’s been forcibly partnered with.

_Water._ Fluid, refreshing. She sits on the edge of the fountain, dragging her hand through it, marvelling how it tickles her hand as it resists the motion before finally rushing between her fingers. As soon as she pulls her hand out, each individual droplet trickles down her hand before reuniting with the pool below.

_What if he is her match, and he’s just too shy to admit it, too?_ She imagines the hypothetical revelation making him smile, a phenomenon she doesn’t think she’ll ever get enough of. Those boyish cheeks lifted even higher, his eyes sparkling. What colour were they? Somehow, she’d failed to notice.

She leaps up and walks in circles across the plaza, trying to get a hold of herself. She can’t entertain such thoughts, not when she has no proof yet. It’ll only crush her even more if she’s built up hope of that.

She continues her investigation, instead: the shiny paint and windscreen of a new car, the bark of a tree, the surface of a stone. But even as she catalogues these things, her mind wanders. Curious about how other things would feel. _Cupping his jaw. Running her fingers through his hair. Splaying her fingers on his chest._ It’s purely scientific, she tries to convince herself. This curiosity.

And yet, she has no desire to quench said curiosity with any other bloke. Any person. Even if it were possible to, which it is definitely not, she’d only want Fitz.

Oh, this is not good at all.

The next thirty-odd hours progress in much the same way. Trying to focus on other things, constantly distracted by her soulmate’s abrupt arrival in her life. Trying to prepare herself for next week’s lab, what she’ll say to him to try to befriend him after the rocky start they had.

But it’s not until seven forty-seven on Thursday morning, when she’s one of the first people in the lecture hall for chemistry, that it hits her that Fitz is _in_ this course. Unless he makes a habit of skipping lecture (which wouldn’t be unbelievable for him), he’ll be here this morning.

Why had this not occurred to her sooner?

There’s just so many people in this class, she’d managed to compartmentalize the lecture portion apart from the lab portion. There are so many fewer students there, such a different learning atmosphere. It’s hard not to separate them mentally.

Suddenly, her decently-controlled anxiety skyrockets again. Heart skips several beats. What if she runs into him? She hasn’t fully prepared for such an encounter yet.

She turns around, scanning the room for him.

Sitting in the very front, as per usual, she has a good view of the entire room. But so far, there’s only about ten other students here, scattered across the room quite randomly.

She tries to focus on what she’s reading, a recent article that caught her interest about genetically engineered allergen-free peanuts. But she can’t stop herself from looking back.

The fourth time she does, she catches sight of him, unmistakeable with his cardigan and tie. The door has just banged closed behind him, way at the top of the hall. But he’s looking down at the ground, evidently unconcerned with whoever else is already in the room. He slumps into a chair in the very back row, the right-hand side too, about as far away from her as he can get. She lets her gaze linger on him for a moment, hoping he’ll glance up and see her, but he doesn’t. He must be looking at his phone, or something else. He looks a bit grumpy, too, from her vantage point. Perhaps not a morning person.

She turns back around, staring numbly at the whiteboard. And doesn’t bother looking back again. She supposes it’s for the best. What would she have done, anyway, if he had seen her? Waved awkwardly? Invited him down to sit with her? Taken the long journey up to the back of the class to sit with him? All those options sound dreadfully anxiety-inducing. It’d probably seem weird and clingy anyway, jumping him like that when he’s not expecting it. Especially this early in the morning.

It’s fine. She can wait until the lab. That’s what she’d planned on, anyway.

But the entirety of the dull lecture, all she can think about is Fitz, sitting in the back of the very same hall. He’s probably just as bored as she is, playing on his computer with engineering stuff.

She’s surprised that mental image makes her smile the way it does.

 

\-----

 

When Tuesday afternoon finally arrives, Fitz is no more prepared than he was five days earlier. He arrives ten minutes early, partly so Jemma knows he was serious about not being tardy again, and partly so that he can mentally prepare himself for when she walks in. After he turns in his completed lab report from last week to the basket in front, he simply takes his seat at their station and waits. He thinks about putting his PPE on, but decides against it. Once he’s suited up, there’s no chance of any skin contact. And stupid and selfish though it may be, he’s hoping for some today. He doesn’t need a lot. Just one touch, and he’ll be content for another week. One little touch.

He jumps every time someone opens the door closest to him, but it’s never her. The TA (Jason, he’d found out his name is by checking the syllabus), then three other students amble in. It’s not until the fifth that he finally sees Jemma.

She looks taken aback to see him, pausing in the doorway like she’s surprised he arrived before her. But she collects herself momentarily, taking a visible breath before offering him a wave and a smile and walking inside.

“Hey, Fitz,” she offers as she approaches their bench.

He realizes he neither waved back nor said anything by the time she sits down, only followed her with his eyes. His poorly committed memory of her didn’t really do the real thing justice. She’s so much more breathtaking than he remembered. Her smile alone brightens the entire aisle around her, and he can actually feel common sense leaving his head the longer he stares at it. Then there’s her eyes, a bright, inviting shade of brown. The way she manages to carry herself with such authority. And is that a bit of a blush on her cheeks?

Oops. He still hasn’t returned her greeting.

“Hi,” he manages. Swallows hard.

Well, this is going well.

“Jemma,” he adds, probably too delayed for it to seem natural. She’d said his name, though.

His last name again. Huh. It’s rare for anyone to refer to him by last name like that. And this is the second time she’s done it in the short time since they met. But it sounds nice when she says it, soft and almost affectionate. Which is mad, because she can’t possibly feel that way.

“Sorry,” she says, unexpectedly. What does she have to apologize for? “I did it again, didn’t I?”

“Did what?” he asks before she can volunteer it.

“Called you by your last name. I don’t know why –”

“That’s fine,” he blurts out.

“Yeah?” she says, surprised.

“Yeah, I, er… I like it,” he manages to say. It must sound mental, but he’s unable to bear the thought of accepting her apology and, by extension, agreeing she should be sorry for anything at all.

She lifts an eyebrow almost flirtatiously. He thinks.

“All right.” With the tiniest of smiles, she delves into her backpack for her things.

Her hands are as of yet un-gloved, and suddenly he realises he’s about to miss his short window to touch her hand again. He runs through a list of ways he could contrive such a scenario in his mind as she pulls out the necessary items from her bag. Just as she’s going for the box of gloves at the end of the bench, a random one spills out of his mouth.

“Oh, er, Jemma, could I… er… borrow a pen?”

Confused, she glances down at his hand, where he’s still holding the pen he’s written down half the protocol with.

“Ran out of ink?” she guesses.

_Nope, just an absolute numpty who forgot to stash it before he asked._

He exhales with relief that she’s giving him the benefit of the doubt. That could’ve gone a lot worse.

“Yeah,” he agrees. If the circumstances were different, he’d be lauding her for giving him a good excuse.

With a little more theatrics than necessary, he chucks it into the nearest bin. A perfectly good pen. Oh well.

“You’re in luck,” she says, fishing around in her bag again. “I’ve got lots.” She glances over at his notebook. “You want black, I imagine. To stay consistent.”

Actually, he couldn’t care less what colour ink he uses or if it matches his old pen, as long as it’s Jemma’s.

When he doesn’t respond, she pulls out a black one, anyway. And when she holds it out for him, there’s only about a centimetre of space left on the end of the pen for him to take it.

Is she reading his mind, or is this entirely coincidental?

Greedy as he is, he doesn’t think on it too hard. It’s still a perfect opportunity, and he doesn’t want to miss it.

He reaches for it hesitantly with his left hand, giving her plenty of time to decide if she wants to change her tactic here. But she doesn’t budge. He steels himself for what’s coming, and closes his hand around the end of the pen, lightly brushing one her thumb and finger as he does.

Fitz thought for sure he had built up that first time in his head. That logically speaking, there was no way the second time would be as magical as he’d come to remember first. But he was oh so wrong. Senses alight in the finger pads that had touched her, no less intensely than before. New cells, new sensitivity, it seems the rule is here. He holds his breath, trying not to visibly react. But it’s still tingling, every last bit of skin that touched hers, blood rushing into that hand as fast as into his face.

His heart screams for him to be bold, to reach out and touch more, not caring whether he’s revealed or not. Thankfully, his brain stops him from doing something so stupid, and he just watches her reaction instead. But, again – there’s not much to go off of. She grins tightly once she’s handed off the pen, then turns back to the rack of gloves.

As he’s putting on his own gloves and coat, he churns over what just happened. She could’ve done that so many other ways. She didn’t have to hold on to so much of that pen – a mere inch on the opposite end would have sufficed. She could’ve just set it on the benchtop for him. She could’ve tossed it on his notebook, for God’s sake.

It’s only as he’s thinking back on the fleeting moment that realizes that, just as he’d reached for the pen with his left, she had held it out with her left hand. When he knows she’s right-handed.

Is it possible she wanted to sneak a little touch of her own?

Oh, how badly he wants to believe that.

But that is scant circumstantial evidence. This is merely confirmation bias at work: he’s only absorbing the evidence that supports the theory he wishes to be true. Because there’s plenty of conflicting evidence, too, that he’d rather ignore: such as that she has neither visibly reacted to this second touch, nor initiated a conversation about the first one.

The way he feels about this whole phenomenon is rare, he knows that much. And what reason does Jemma have to fear she’d be mismatched? She’s beautiful and, evidently, brilliant. She could probably have whoever she wanted either way.

No, chances are, his gut instinct is right. He still needs more evidence, more time to be certain, but...

Fitz pinches the bridge of his nose. God, that was such a bad, impetuous idea. He’s only got patches of three fingers on his left hand with sensation, now. It’s going to feel odd until he can somehow contrive a left-handed handshake, or another similar form of contact. (Assuming he can even think of another one that wouldn’t be construed as plain harassment, because right now he’s coming up rather blank.)

He doesn’t have any more time to mull it over before Jason is calling the now full lab to attention.

They’re both a bit less talkative, this time around. Fitz knows in his case, he’s about a hundred times more nervous, being in his bloody soulmate’s presence and making his best effort not to make a total fool of himself in front of her. Only one chance at a first impression, and he already mucked it up. Trying to redeem himself is actually quite stressful.

But it remains a mystery why Jemma is quieter. Especially considering how talkative she’d been last week: narrating the experiment, asking him questions, bossing him around. He sort of misses it.

A small, optimistic part of him hopes it’s because she’s nervous too, being around her own soulmate. But the much larger, realistic part of him that relies on evidence and logic assumes it’s because she’s already decided she doesn’t much care for him.

It’s not that they don’t talk at all, because they definitely do. And Fitz relishes in every bit of new information about her. It’s mostly things related to school – their class schedules, their research interests, what they want to do when they finish school. He tells her about his plan to be an aerospace engineer, and she confesses she’s still having trouble deciding between biotechnology and medical research.

And just as last week, they divide up their tasks efficiently, and complete the base protocol _and_ the extra few steps of investigation that had tacked on quicker than any other pair.

He can’t believe a week ago he had all but written off the idea of a friendship with her. He’s never met anyone so passionate and intelligent before. He’s not overly fond of biology, but he could listen to her talk about it all day. And damn it if she doesn’t manage to make these fogged-up, bulky lab goggles, that make everyone else look like a clown, look adorable.

As the minutes tick by, he’s more and more glad that they’re required to wear full PPE in this lab – that the coat, goggles, gloves can’t come off until they’ve finished. He isn’t sure how he’d stop himself from touching her if they were working this closely together without all that. Every time she taps impatiently on the bench with her fingers as they wait, he can’t help but imagine they’re somewhere else: that her gloves are gone, and he can stop her fidgeting by taking her hands gently in his, brushing his thumb over her skin. Whenever she’s turned away, he can hardly think of anything but what it’d be like to brush the back of his hand along her smooth cheek.

And he’s not proud to admit this, but every second the experiment doesn’t require his immediate focus, he can’t stop staring at her.

They complete their entire modified protocol in, again, just under two hours. But last time, the end couldn’t come soon enough. Now, it’s far too soon. They’ve still got another hour allotted to finish, and he’d like nothing more than to spend it with Jemma. But, lacking a good enough excuse to have them both stick around an extra hour, he’s mute as they finish recording up their observations and final measurements and turn in the carbon copies.

He holds out hope that perhaps Jemma will end every lab with a friendly parting handshake, once they’re free of these bloody gloves.

But she does no such thing today.

“See you next week, Fitz,” she says as she walks past where he’s still stuffing things into his bag.

When he looks up, she gives him a smile that takes his breath away. Awkward red goggle lines on her face or not, she’s stunning.

“See you,” he echoes, trying to smile back. Only hoping he succeeds.

He watches her until she gets to the door, and she stops and glances back before she opens it.

“Good luck with that rat liver.”

“Thanks,” he mumbles out.

With a parting wave, she’s gone.

Fitz’s heart does a backflip in his chest. He’d only mentioned his dread over the upcoming lab this week in biochem in passing. She wasn’t just nodding along with his stories and complaints about his other courses. She was listening, and remembered everything he’d said. Wished him luck.

Floating on the reassurance of that one simple gesture, Fitz can’t stop smiling the rest of the evening.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My holiday gift to you guys - an update amidst the madness! :) The URT is really starting to ramp up now :P

Oh, Fitz.

He wears ties that don’t match his shirts. Jumpers that look more suited for her grandparents than a sixteen-year-old. He’s not all that interested in biology. His hair is neither brown nor blond, but frustratingly in between. He can be a bit standoffish, too.

But such things have become so trivial in the two lab sessions she’s spent with him. Instead, she finds herself fixating solely on his appealing qualities: his far-above-average intellect, his passion for physics, the way his Scottish stutter reminds her of home. Those bright, clear eyes of his, kaleidoscopes of several different hues of blue that scatter light like zircon crystals. So intense when he’s paying close attention. Staring into those eyes in person is nothing short of mesmerizing, but even when she’s alone, the mere memory of his gaze can completely derail her thoughts.

Even the very same quirks that once turned her off have become more appealing in retrospect. Because the mismatched outfits suit him, somehow. When she talks about biology, he’s clever enough to keep up despite his lack of background in the subject. And her frustration with his indefinable hair colour doesn’t stop her from daydreaming about running her fingers through those curls. And she has to admit, his ‘rude’ remarks have made her chuckle several times now. He’s not mean-spirited. Frustrated, if anything, from a lifetime surrounded by people who were never on his wavelength. That’s something Jemma can relate to.

She can’t believe she ever thought he wasn’t worth her time. He’s clearly the cleverest person she’s met since arriving here, and she’s including professors in that count. He can perhaps be slightly rude, when provoked, but the majority of the time he’s incredibly sweet. Attentive, polite. Not irresponsible, either. Less dedicated to studying with all his waking free time, perhaps, but he wants to be here as much as she does. Dedicated to mastering his field. Never has a first impression she’s had been so utterly wrong.

She’s still serious about her plan to become proper friends, somehow. It’s the only way she can possibly find out about his soulmate status. But as the days go by, she wonders whether she even wants to know. The possibility of having to walk away, not being able to even see him anymore, is already more painful than it should be, having only spent a handful of hours in the lab with him.

It feels like she’s known him longer than that. Probably because a good portion of her waking (and sleeping) thoughts are consumed by him.

But, as intense as her desire is to spend more time with him, she goes on pretending she doesn’t know where he sits in lecture. They haven’t exchanged numbers or e-mails, or seen one another outside of the lab, after all. Jemma has been too terrified of slipping up to ask.

Jemma finds herself looking forward to their next lab more than anything else at the university. More than the classes she’s actually interested in, more than meals. Seeing Fitz is the highlight of her week.

The third week’s laboratory passes in a similar manner to the second: mostly efficient work mixed with the occasional chatter. But it’s the happiest Jemma’s been since last Tuesday, no question.

They still talk over each other when they’re thinking out loud, bicker slightly when they’re trying to decide the most efficient way of doing something. But Jemma has learned it’s only because both of them think too fast to leave enough pauses for proper conversation. They are both more than capable of talking and listening at the same time, as well, a skill many people lack. Thinking mostly in formulas and geometry, he has a unique perspective on things. It’s exciting to have such a complementary intellect beside her.

They don’t share study habits, it seems, but they do discover they both watch Doctor Who. How could they not, being British as they are? She confesses she’s not caught up because she hasn’t found a good way to watch new episodes. He jots her number down in his lab notebook, promising to send her a link to the site he uses.

As they’ve both skipped lunch this week, they spend a sizeable portion of the latter half of their experiment talking about what they’d like to have for dinner. When all he can think about are sandwiches, Jemma promises to text him back a recipe she thinks he’d like.

Though the prospect of having his phone number is undeniable progress, Jemma is still in mourning when they finish the protocol with an hour to spare once again.

But just after they’ve turned in their pages and returned to their station, catastrophe strikes.

Fitz has just unbuttoned his lab coat when a passing undergraduate bumps into a classmate and sloshes the contents of a beaker. Jemma watches several big drops hit the floor, and she immediately springs into action.

“What was in that beaker?” she says calmly, holding her hands out as the bloke freezes.

“HCl,” he answers in a rush, practically shaking in his trainers.

“What concentration?”

They’d used two concentrations today – 0.05M and 6M – the latter constituting a far greater hazard.

“The higher one,” he splutters out, still frozen to the spot.

Jemma rushes over to the spill kit and scoops up a glove full of baking soda, tossing it onto the caustic liquid. She waits for the violent bubbles to die, then wets a few paper towels to clean up the spill before Jason even makes his way over to the site of the accident.

“Nicely, done, Jemma. Quick thinking,” he says. “Did it get anywhere else?”

“I don’t think so, sir,” Fitz volunteers.

“Excellent. Disaster averted! Mr. Xu, you need to be more careful,” he addresses the boy who’d spilt, walking back with him to his station. “What’s the rule for when you’re walking behind people with hazardous materials?”

Jemma doesn’t hear the rest.

“Jemma.” Fitz sounds serious.

When she looks up, he’s holding his tie out with his gloves. Jemma frowns. He knows as well as she does that rule #1 of lab safety is to never touch your clothes or face with gloves still on.

“Some of the acid got on my tie,” he says under his breath.

“Fitz!” she nearly shouts.

He shushes her immediately, panic in his eyes. “I don’t want Jason to know.”

“Wh –”

“He’ll make me strip and take a bloody shower in the hallway!” he whispers frantically.

“Fitz…” Jemma peers through the gaps in the benches over to Jason, finding him occupied on the other side of the room.

“It didn’t get anywhere else. I watched the whole thing. There’s just one drop, on my tie. See?”

She glances down to where there’s a growing, fraying pale patch on his striped blue tie.

“Well, what do you want me to do, cut it off?”

“Have you got scissors?” he asks.

“No.”

He sighs. “Well, you can’t just go looking for some, he’ll want to know what for. Just help me get it off.” He tugs on the tie, his stupid, shining blue eyes pleading.

He can’t untie it with his contaminated gloves, but nor can he let go of the tie to remove his gloves, lest the acid spread onto his shirt then to his skin.

Is this really happening right now? Is the universe _letting_ this happen right now???

If she has to take off his tie without unthreading the knot, she has to loosen it and lift it over his head herself. How exactly is she supposed to do that without touching him? On his neck, and head, no less? Oh, this is so bad.

But it’s Fitz. He’s being threatened by a corrosive, and she doesn’t want to force him into the humiliation of a public shower. She doesn’t have a choice, really. She has to help him.

Per the rules of safety, she has to take off her gloves, so she peels them off and slips out of her coat so as not to inadvertently expose him to something else. She stands to his side while he holds the tie out as far away from them both as he can. Thankfully, the people to either side of them seem to wrapped up in their experiments to notice what they’re doing.

She strives for professionalism, at first. Loosening the (thankfully) simple knot in his tie bit by bit, without managing to touch anything but his shirt, where it’s safe. But she’s losing her mind, being this close. A thin fabric away from unlocking more of her sense of touch. From, perhaps, putting him in a circumstance where he can’t help but reveal himself, if he is her match. From her studies of maps of nerve endings, one’s neck is a sensitive spot.

Hmm.

Suddenly Jemma is tempted.

She tries to tell herself it’s a bad idea, that it’d be taking advantage of him. But her curiosity gets the better of her. As she pushes his collar up to free him of the now-loosened tie, she brushes her knuckles against the skin of his neck.  

And Fitz gasps.

It’s small, hardly audible, but unmistakeable.

Glancing up at his face, there’s just a slight tinge of pink on his cheeks. He also appears to have stopped breathing.

Spurred on, she allows herself another touch. More than one replicate is required for valid scientific study, right?

This time, Fitz merely squeezes his eyes shut.

The backs of her fingers where she just touched him are swimming with signals, like they’re suddenly filled with little live wires, buzzing with that familiar, pleasant electric hum where they’ve just been turned on.

Jemma’s heart flutters in her chest. Is it possible that… this moment, he’s experiencing the same thing?

Or maybe he just can’t wait for this awkward situation – where his female lab partner has to intimately take off his tie to save him from even worse embarrassment – to be over.

Ugh, what is she thinking!? 

She stops stalling and starts lifting the sufficiently loosened tie, and he follows her lead. She honestly tries not to to touch his face, keeping her hands to either side of his head as much as she can. But the way his hair tickles her fingers (the spots that it can, anyway) catches her off guard. Her hand wobbles just slightly and she bumps his nose with her left arm.

Oops.

They get the tie clear of his head only a second later, and she lets go of it as soon as possible. He immediately walks over to the fume hood with it, setting down inside the lip before walking over to the spill kit.

She’s endlessly glad he’s walked away, because she lets out a few gasping breaths she hadn’t realizes she was holding in. And can’t help running her fingers over the new spots Fitz had just activated: the spot on her arm, the backs of her knuckles.

She really needs to get a grip. She thought she had prepared for this. It’s not like she hasn’t done it before, now, with the inside of her right hand, the little bits of her left. She can touch something new now without sending her nerves and thoughts into a frenzy. It’s just Fitz that does this; touching him is its own category. Evidently, it does send her into a frenzy.

He comes back with handful of baking soda and what appears to be a beaker of clear liquid. Hopefully, water. He throws the powder onto the tie, then pours a bit of the liquid onto it. It fizzles spectacularly.

“Could’ve been bad,” he says, with a nervous chuckle.

His face is most definitely pinker than usual.

“Yeah,” she agrees, trying to sound normal. What _is_ normal?

“Thanks for helping me out,” he says, almost breathless.

It makes Jemma’s mind wander again. Is he going through the same slow transformation, and too shy to talk about it? Or is he simply jarred from nearly having chemical burns on his chest due to a careless error of another undergraduate?

The latter. It’s got to be the latter. She’s being silly.

“No problem,” she says, as casually as she can. It comes out more hysteric. “Sorry about your tie,” she adds.

He shrugs, as he collects the spent cloth and tosses it in the bin.

She’s got to get out of here before his PPE comes off and she’s confronted with even worse temptation.

She turns around, collects her things, and waves a quick farewell.

“See you next week,” she rushes out as he peels off his gloves.

“See you,” she barely hears him say before she’s out the door.

She’s already hyperventilating again when she reaches her dorm.

God, she can’t handle this. It feels like she’s crumbling from the inside. She keeps telling herself with more time, she’ll be able to figure out whether he’s her match, but it seems to only get further out of her reach the more time she spends with him. Each new touch is an adrenaline shot greater than the last, an electric burst of life that feels so right all she wants is more. But this aftermath, feeling guilty and dreading the day he finds out about her, is like what she imagines a crash from a high feels like.

There’s a reason this experience is meant to be shared. Going it alone is almost unbearable.

She needs to just ask him.

How can she just ask him, though? it’s not exactly a polite conversation topic. It’s like asking if one is a virgin, or has a girlfriend. It’s rude, for one thing, and it certainly implies a level of romantic interest. And would no doubt elicit scrutiny of her own soulmate and relationship status that she isn’t prepared to bear.

Groaning to her empty room, she pulls out her backpack and prepares to distract herself with homework as best she can.

At 6:10 PM, she gets a text from an unfamiliar number. Stomach swooping, she reads it from the notification screen immediately.

It’s a link.

She swipes into the message, and a second text comes in just as she’s examining the link for authenticity.

_Use a proxy if you don’t want to get caught by the university’s streaming police. – Fitz_

He’d used his last name.

A huge smile spreads across Jemma’s face. An unfamiliar, warm excitement spreads through her bloodstream until she’s lightheaded with it.

_Thanks :)_

Jemma Simmons has never sent a text with an emoji in her life. What has gotten into her?

Still, she adds him as a contact straightaway. It takes more willpower than it should not to put a heart next to his name.

Oh, dear, she’s screwed.

She remembers the recipe he requested, and types it out the best she can from memory. But she forgets a few details on the pesto aioli, and has to text her mum to get the ratios right, so it’s a little bit before she gets it sent off.

Still, only a few seconds after she’s pressed ‘send’ on the recipe, he replies.

_Great! :)_

Jemma smiles widely again, and want to slap herself for being such a typical teenager.

At that very moment, though, there’s a knock on her doorframe.

May.

“Everything okay?” she asks.

It’s the third week in a row she’s visited Jemma around this time. It’s almost like she expects every Tuesday afternoon to completely unravel her composure now.

Jemma hates the fact that so far that expectation has held true.

May is quiet, keeps to herself save where her responsibilities are concerned. She’s a fourth-year in criminal justice, and does kickboxing in her spare time. Interests Jemma finds as intriguing as intimidating.

But Jemma can’t deny that she trusts her implicitly. So far, May has been nothing but kind, but not overbearingly so. She’s always been there for Jemma, if only when called upon. She doesn’t push, or pry. It’s not her style.

Desperate as she is right now, Jemma thinks maybe she should tell May about Fitz. Maybe she’ll have some informed advice that Daisy and her mum both lack.

“May…” she begins, turning in her chair. “Have you got a soulmate?”

Unexpectedly, May takes a couple of steps into Jemma’s room, reaching behind her to close the door. When it closes, she crosses her arms across her chest, looking even more attentive than before. Raising her eyebrows with just a hint of a smirk, she nods.

“I do.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This weekend's surprisingly (like, INCREDIBLY SURPRISINGLY) pleasant episode of aos made me want to get another update of this out real quick today. As per usual, this fic is a freakin' blossom of pure joy in my life and reading through it again takes me to a completely different place. I hope it brings some of that happiness to you guys, as well. <3
> 
> Note for my dw audience: I really do apologize to my loyal readers waiting on EP. I am just so slammed at work and haven't had a chance to write chapter 36 yet. And since this fic is already fully written and all I had to do was some minor touching up of this chapter... welp, here we are. Once I get through this rough patch at the lab, EP is first priority. Thanks for your patience <3

By the fourth week, Fitz genuinely can’t imagine his life without Jemma. Which is stupid. He barely even knows her. They’ve yet to spend any time together outside of this lab.

It’s just... everything about her.

How intently she listens. How she never stops talking about physiology and biochemistry but he doesn’t mind listening to it. The constant intellectual challenge she presents – he finds himself studying harder these days merely so he always has a new topic with which to impress her. The way she says his name even when it’s not necessary, almost as though it’s just fun for her to say. And damn it if that recipe she sent him wasn’t the best bloody sandwich he’s ever had.

He hasn’t talked to her since Wednesday, when he texted her saying as much.

_That sandwich was delicious,_ he’d said.

It had taken her a little over an hour to respond. The longest hour of his life.

_Glad you enjoyed it! :D_

He hasn’t initiated a conversation since, and to his dismay, neither has she.

But this is very new, this tenuous friendship they have. He doesn’t want to push it by getting too clingy.

When he walks into the lab and sees her already there waiting for him at their bench, he does his best to act like he hasn’t been dying to see her all week.

He has no way of knowing, of course, but it seems like she’s as pleased to see him as he is to see her, and the mere thought has his heart soaring.

He has half a mind to drag out today’s experiment by purposely messing up on certain steps. Knocking over a beaker here, adding an incorrect volume there. But he thinks better of it, for two reasons. First, Jemma would probably catch him before he made any time-consuming mistakes and prevent him from committing them. Second, whether or not he was successful in delaying the experiment, she’d probably think he was clumsy or less intelligent as a result. And he absolutely cannot have that. He’d rather have an hour less time with her than disqualify himself from her companionship for making himself out to be denser than he is.

So he goes along with their usual highly efficient pace, dividing up tasks whenever they can, taking turns when they can’t. Both of their methods and quantitation flawless.

Fitz expects the daydreams about her when he’s in another class, or alone back at his dorm, or eating dinner with suitemates that are trying to be nice him.

But today, it’s getting hard not to daydream about her even when he’s _with_ her.

He can’t stop imagining what it’d be like if they were in a proper relationship. How many things that are currently off-limits would be commonplace, even expected. Wrapping her in hug when he sees her, simply because he missed her and he’s ecstatic to hold her in his arms again. Sitting next to each other on his bed in the evenings, watching Doctor Who, putting his arm around her to pull her closer. And more explicitly romantic things, too. Like kissing her.

It’s only recently he’s started ponder that concept. Kissing. He couldn’t bear the thought of it for most of his life: an awkward, messy practice that seemed to have little purpose except to spread germs. But with a bit of time to process his newly functioning neurons (and conclude that he rather likes them), he’s softened to the idea. From what relatively little he knows of anatomy, he’s aware that lips are among the most sensitive spots.

That in itself is intriguing: a touch of hands feels quite nice, now, so how much nicer would a touch of lips feel?

On top of that, there’s the fact that lately his eyes always seem to subconsciously drift to Jemma’s mouth when he’s looking at her. Her lips are pink and enticing in a way he can’t really make sense of. And, a scientist through and through, he can’t help but grow more and more curious why he’s so drawn to them. What everyone else is always fussing about. If they’re as soft and smooth as they look. What they’d feel like pressed against his.

The lab is over too soon, again.

During the ten minutes they spend cleaning up and finishing their recorded observations of the session, Fitz is trying to muster up the courage to ask her to do something with him. He really needs to start showing her he wants to be friends, not just lab partners. Being proper mates is the only way he’ll ever find out what he needs to know, because he’s already spent of ideas contrive another platonic touch within these walls.

He decides to go with asking her to get dinner with him. It’s just a friendly gesture, perfectly innocent. The school’s café is hardly a romantic setting. Loud, bright, crowded.

When Jemma offers him her usual goodbye as she puts her things into her bag, she has a brilliant smile reserved for him as always.

Fitz takes a deep breath. Now’s his last chance.

But, after only a fraction of a second being on the receiving end of that smile, he’s suddenly gripped with terror that it could likely disappear as soon as he’s asked. Turn into a cringe, a frown, or something else unpleasant as she tries to think of a way to let him down easy.

His question dies right on the tip of his tongue.

Instead, he says the same thing he always does when she inevitably says goodbye to him.

“See you.”

What he doesn’t expect, as Jemma walks past him for the door, is the light touch of her hand on his exposed forearm.

Fitz nearly has a bloody heart attack.

As soon as she’s cleared the doorway, the goggles and pen in his hand clatter to the floor as he hurries to investigate the newly sentient spot on his left arm. Tracing the shape of Jemma’s hand, testing the sensitivity of the area with the tip of his finger.  

Having skipped lunch, he’d been planning all day to get some food straight after this lab, but dinner in a crowded cafeteria is just about out of the question now. He rushes straight back to his dorm, instead, his hand hardly leaving his arm. It’s embarrassing, that even the fourth time this has happened, it still affects him so strongly. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he wonders how he would be able to stay conscious – survive, even – if this were happening across wider areas. The tiny patches she gets in any one instance are just about enough to reduce him to hysterics. As long as Jemma is around, he can hold himself together all right, but once he’s alone again, it always catches up with him. The calm façade crumbles, and fast.

As he’s rushing down the fourth-floor hall to his room, he passes by the RA’s door, and can’t help but notice it’s open.

Phil is in there, seated at his desk, his attention fixed on his computer. He’s got his glasses on, which means he’s in study mode. Fitz knows he has his qualifying exam coming up (he’s a doctoral student in history), and would hate to disturb him. He glances at the posted advising hours for the week posted on the whiteboard. Then checks his phone. Yep, right in the middle of them.

Phil had been nicer than anyone else on the floor the day Fitz moved in. Had said repeatedly that he could come to him with anything, school-related or not. Always has a smile and friendly greeting for Fitz when he sees him. Makes the occasional stop by his room to make sure he’s settling in okay, ask about his coursework.

Fitz looks down at his arm. Feels his heart thudding against his chest. This soulmate business is becoming a real problem. It’s properly taking over his life. And Phil seems like a good person to talk to. Friendly, and an order of magnitude more mature and professional than the undergraduates filling out the dormitory.

It couldn’t hurt to try.

Fitz knocks lightly on the open door. Phil turns around immediately.

“Hey, Leo,” he greets him with a smile.

Odd. The only person he’s spoken to in person with any frequency the last few weeks is Jemma, and she exclusively calls him Fitz. It sounds almost strange to hear ‘Leo’ spoken aloud now.

“Erm, you can call me... Fitz,” he says, tenuously.

“You got it,” Phil nods. “So, Fitz, what can I do for you?”

“I actually just wanted to ask you something, if I could.”

“I’m all ears.” He swipes off his reading glasses and tucks them into the pocket of his shirt. “Why don’t you sit down?” he gestures to the plush couch next to his desk.

Fitz hurries over to it and sits on the end closest to the desk, dropping his bag on the floor at his feet.

“I have a... problem.”

“Mhm,” Phil nods, as though that much was obvious by Fitz walking in here at all. “What kind of problem?”

“It’s...” Fitz breaks away from Phil’s overly concerned gaze. It’s obvious that he cares, whatever the problem is, and is eager to help. Fitz doesn’t want to disappoint him with a problem as trivial and common and romance. “A girl,” he confesses with a grimace.

“Someone you like?” he asks.

“To say the least.”

“Tell me about her,” he prods.

Fitz takes a deep breath, bouncing his fingertips together. “I think she’s... my soulmate.”

“You think?” Phil asks, a smile on his face like Fitz is making a joke.

“Right, okay, she is,” Fitz admits.

“Did you meet her here?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you like her?”

“Yes, I do,” Fitz rushes out, feeling the need to come to her defence. Phil had asked as though disliking her were even an option. “She’s... incredible.”

“So, what’s the problem?” Phil asks, genuinely looking confused.

“The problem is, I don’t know if I’m hers.”

Phil gapes at him for a long second before asking incredulously, “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“I mean, I don’t,” he snaps without intending to. “I haven’t told her. We haven’t talked about it.”

“How’s that even possible?” The way he asks, it’s almost a statement that he doesn’t intend Fitz to answer.

Fitz sighs. He’ll have to start at the beginning, then. 

He walks Phil through a (very) abridged version of the whole story – from being bullied in high school to that life-changing handshake and its lonely aftermath.

“Fitz, I completely understand you being nervous to come clean,” Phil says, once he’s had a few moments to process. “But you have to find out if your hers, too.”

“Yeah,” he sighs. “I know.” That much, he’d figured out on his own. “But how?”

Phil doesn’t answer his question, but his face scrunches up in thought, and he stares at Fitz as though the answers are written on his face somewhere.

“Has she tried to touch you at all since then?” he asks.

“Well.” Fitz thinks back to the last few weeks. “Yeah.”

He tells Phil about the pen, and the tie incident, and her touching his arm earlier.

“I honestly can’t believe you were able to keep that quiet.”

Fitz throws himself back against the couch, exasperated. “Is that all you got out of that?” he throws his hands up dramatically.

“I just... I can’t imagine! When I found mine, I freaked out.”

“You’ve,” Fitz interrupts him shakily, surprised. “You’ve got one, too?”

“Mhm.” Phil nods, and Fitz leans over on his knees again, more rapt than before. “And I’m serious, I don’t think I could’ve contained myself if my life depended on it.”

Fitz is silent for a few breaths. Trying to make sense of it. He’s never been able to talk candidly about this soulmate stuff with anyone who’s actually experienced it. His parents hadn’t, and of course, all his friends were in the same boat with him, yet to find the soulmates they’d never asked for.

“Who is she?” Fitz asks.

“Her name’s Melinda. She’s an undergraduate in another department here.”

“So... are you... I mean.” Fitz works his hands around each other in a vague spherical motion, though he has no idea why. “You’re together?”

“We are.” Phil nods.

“And you’re... happy?”

“Well, life has its ups and downs but, yeah. I’d like to think so.”

Wow. Fitz sits back again, letting that wash over him. The concept is almost impossible for him to comprehend.

“Also, I don’t want to get your hopes up,” Phil continues, “but, it sounds to me like there’s a real chance Jemma is experiencing the same thing you are. Just, for whatever reason, she’s equally shy to admit it.”

Fitz’s panic level shoots up. His eyes widen, and he covers his face in his hands and takes a few deep breaths. But it doesn’t help much.

Hearing Phil’s story, the possibility of success here seems to much closer to his grasp. He’s starting to believe Jemma might actually be his match after all.

It’s dangerous. It’ll only crush him worse if he’s wrong.

“You okay?” Phil asks, when Fitz is silent for too long.

“Yeah, just... how do I tell her?”

It’s becoming too real, the thought of confessing. He’s able to keep calm about it most of the time (at least apart from moments when she touches him someplace new), because actually telling her has been out of the question. But now Phil is here and saying these things and encouraging him and applying this pressure and... before he knows it he’s basically hyperventilating, trying to blink moisture out of his eyes.

“Fitz, it’s going to be okay.” Phil stands and puts a hand on his shoulder, rubbing his thumb there a few times. Fitz can’t feel it, not really, as it’s not a place Jemma has blessed him with her touch, but he nonetheless appreciates the sentiment.

Fitz nods, trying to believe that.

“What was your plan, before you came to me?” Phil asks.

“I didn’t really have one, I suppose,” he admits. “I thought I’d just... be her friend. Eventually it’d come out, somehow.”

Phil sits on the couch next to him. “That’s not a bad plan,” he says, and he sounds sincere. “I’d support you if you wanted to do that.” There’s a pause where it seems like Phil is trying to decide how best to phrase his imminent qualifier. “But I do think it might be better to get it out in the open. You’ll either be pleasantly surprised,” he changes his tone for the latter half of the sentence, “or you’ll get to move on. It won’t consume you anymore.”

“You’re right.” Fitz nods, but all the anxiety slams into him even harder. He buckles over at the waist, holding his head in his hands because it’s suddenly too heavy to support. “Oh, God.”

“You can do this, Fitz. I have every confidence in you.”

“Just... _how_?” he over-emphasizes the second word.

“Well, it shouldn’t be someplace as public as the lab. Maybe invite her to study, to lunch, casual, nothing serious. Not a date. That way you’ll have some measure of privacy, and an easy out you wouldn’t have otherwise.”

“She does talk about studying a lot,” he recalls out loud.

“There you go,” Phil encourages.

“Thank you, Phil,” Fitz says, turning to him. “Really.”

“Don’t mention it,” he says, patting him on the back.

“You can’t even feel this, can you?” Phil says suddenly, realizing he’s made the wrong sort of gesture.

“Not exactly, no,” Fitz admits with a chuckle.

“Where all has she gotten you so far?”

He runs Phil through the list. Inside of his right hand, some of his left, the spot on his arm, the couple patches on his neck.

“Oh, and a little spot on my nose, here,” he adds, touching the tip of his nose with his finger.

Phil smiles, shaking his head. “It’s a brave new world.”

“What about you?” Fitz asks after a moment.

Phil suddenly looks nervous for the first time since this conversation began.

“Well,” he tilts his head, failing to hide a guilty grimace.

“What, everywhere?” Fitz asks, eyes bulging wide.

“Well, don’t act so scandalized,” Phil defends himself. “We’re both adults. And we’ve been together five years now.”

Fitz takes a deep breath and exhales it slowly, resting his chin on his hand. He can hardly imagine such a thing; it’s overwhelming for him to get one new square inch of sensation on his arm.

He knows it’s still a big _if_ that he is Jemma’s soulmate at all. But somehow, hearing that things have gone so well for Phil, that he started exactly where Fitz is now and has come so far, is reassuring.

“I’ve got to find out,” he says suddenly, with more conviction than he ever has.

Like I said,” Phil says, smiling again.

His smile is somehow reassuring, in itself. Fitz really should come to him for advice more often.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Churned out another quick update this weekend. Decided to make it a longer one as to not to leave off on a terrible cliffie. I hope you guys enjoy it! <3

By the fifth week, Jemma can hardly imagine her life without Fitz. Even though that’s ridiculous. She’s barely known him a month, and they’re on life paths that are destined to sharply diverge in merely a couple of years.

But she can’t help it. It’s everything about him.

The way he never shuts up about physical chemistry or mechanics or sandwiches, but she doesn’t get tired of listening to him talk. Most blokes, she’d be rolling her eyes and tuning them out, doing both their shares of the lab work by herself. But she loves the sound of his voice. That soothing Scottish lilt, his innate excitement for science. It’s so rare to find someone else who has it; and who’s passionate enough about it to want to talk about it instead of pop culture and beer like most college students (and even teenagers).

Something in her gut, an innate feeling she can’t pin down, is telling her that he is someone who’s meant to be a part of her life, in some way or another. As time goes on, it’s making her think she may be his soulmate, after all. And ever since her talk with May, she’s surrendered to that hunch more and more.

But logically, Jemma knows she should never count on such a thing. She couldn’t handle the rejection, if she turned out to be wrong. Fitz is already all she can think about. How much worse would it be if they got entangled in something, only to have him find his proper soulmate somewhere down the road? It’s giving her phantom pain in her chest just thinking about it.

May had suggested she talk to Fitz about it, come clean, and seemed confident that Jemma is going to get good news. But at the time, Jemma was having trouble being openly optimistic about such a suggestion. Her brain only runs on data, empirical evidence. And the evidence in front of her doesn’t support that hypothesis strongly enough to quell her fears. She’s still stuck falling back on the null.

Not wanting to force her into a plan that made her uncomfortable, May had, in essence, endorsed Jemma’s plan to befriend Fitz before breaking the news. But she had also not-very-subtly implied Jemma speed up the process to shorten the time she’d have to wait.

At first, Jemma hadn’t expected such acquiescence from someone so seemingly fearless and mature. But May had also confessed to being comparably afraid she wasn’t destined for anyone, either.

_“Guess I got lucky,”_ she had said. _“I might not have said anything, either, if Phil hadn’t outed himself right away.”_

It’s nice, though, knowing Jemma is not alone in her trepidation, and that she has someone to turn to if this all goes sour.

Despite May’s lack of forcefulness, Jemma somehow wants to confess more just to make her proud. To prove she can be as brave as she is clever.

She’d promised May she’d at least try, sometime soon. And she will. 

Could it be today?

In the several days since that discussion, she’d made quite a bit of progress, mentally speaking. When she woke up this morning, for the first time, she felt ready to take the leap. She had even mustered up enough courage to spend her lunch hour rehearsing a few ways she could bring up the subject with Fitz.

So as she walks through the door of the lab at ten minutes ‘til two, she’s confident she’s prepared to see him, whenever he arrives.

But she hadn’t prepared herself well enough, after all.

He’s already here, for one thing. Looking extra charming today, a tie with equations on it and his hair looking even curlier and more touchable than usual, if that’s possible.

Before they even get started with their experiment, he’s got a wild story from his mechatronics lab to tell her. She couldn’t possibly kill his good mood by bringing up something so serious and personal, and she does love listening to him tell a story. He’s so dramatic and expressive. Funny.

Then, shortly after they get started, an undergraduate named Robbie with a penchant for pyrotechnics manages to light his partner’s hair on fire, and nearly the entire lab, in a Bunsen burner mishap. Once the dust (and carbon dioxide powder) has settled, she and Fitz both quietly in stitches about it as they carry on the experiment. The laughter soon dissolves into a competition in which they swap stories of idiotic questions or mishaps from peers in their other courses. Trying to one-up each other with each one.

Fitz eventually wins: a student in his biochem lecture had asked (pointing to an H+ written on the board) ‘what’s H-T?’ near the end of a lecture about acid-base chemistry.

Shortly after that, they both discover they’d independently watched the new Spider-man film over the weekend (just arrived to Netflix), and by the time they’ve finished discussing its strengths and pitfalls, they’re finished with the experiment. Her time has already dwindled down to mere minutes.

They’re relatively quiet as they clean up today. Jemma is trying to disinter the courage that had been buried once she walked inside, but she isn’t sure what’s causing Fitz’s uncharacteristic silence. He was reticent as ever when they met, and he’s still fairly quiet around everyone else, but around Jemma, he’s really come out of his shell. He was talkative as ever as they worked, so she isn’t sure what’s causing his relative quietness at the moment.

She’d texted him a few times, this week, trying to make progress on her goal. It certainly hadn’t been easy, trying to think of something casual to say, texting him first. She focuses on that, trying to remind herself that she is, indeed, capable of bravery. He’d texted back fairly fast, the first time, and certainly hadn’t seemed annoyed at being contacted. Of the four subsequent times they spoke via message, he initiated the conversation twice.

They were brief, casual conversations, but if he’s agreeable to texting about topics unrelated to this lab, perhaps he’d also be willing to talk in person outside of it.

But before she can gather the last of her courage to get her mouth to work, Fitz is already throwing things in his bag.

Well, there goes that, then. The last of her time is up.

She supposes she could carve herself out a couple more minutes by walking out with him, but they’ve never walked out together, and she doesn’t want to randomly start today. Doesn’t want to risk being perceived as some sort of stalker.

“Hey, erm,” Fitz says, presumably talking to her, though his eyes are still fixed on his backpack.

She doesn’t respond, waiting for him to finish his thought instead.

“I was wondering if... you’d want to study with me tonight.” He finally throws his bag over his shoulder and turns to look at her, a strange shyness in his eyes she hasn’t seen since the first week.

“Study?” she asks, dumbfounded.

“Yeah, for the exam,” he adds, like she should already know that. “Thursday,” he says when she remains quiet. “For this class,” he adds yet again, looking almost alarmed that she hasn’t said anything.

Oh, God! She hasn’t said anything.

“Right!” she nearly shouts. “The exam!” She nods, smiling. “Sure! That sounds great.”

“Great,” he echoes, and she hears him exhale with a bit of relief. “The Caf is a bit too loud, but the library’s too quiet... want to come over to my building?” He shrugs, as though it’s an everyday request.

Jemma completely freezes. His place? In all her contemplation of the different outcomes of today’s laboratory, this was never, ever one of them.

But Jemma doesn’t have time to panic and analyse just yet. She only has a few seconds to give Fitz an affirmative before he’ll think she doesn’t want to study with him.

Even dedicating all her functioning brain cells to responding to him, she’s barely able to nod, and choke out a soft ‘yeah,’ but that’s about it.

“Okay,” he nods, looking a bit concerned for her sanity. “How about eight o’clock?” he asks.

Forcing a smile, she manages one more silent nod.

“Great. I’m in Miller. 301. Just text me when you get there, I’ll come down and open the door for you.”

And with that, and a smile that makes her heart come close to fluttering right out through her mouth, he walks away.

Heart stopped in her chest and eyes bulging out of her head, Jemma can’t do much more than stare after him for several moments.

By all accounts, she should be happy. This is exactly what she wanted. More time with him. Time to actually get to know one another without being confined to their benchtop.

But his _dormitory_?

They could meet anywhere besides the library or the Caf. The campus Starbucks, the study rooms in the rec centre, a bloody table in the Quad, for God’s sake. She’s never even been in a boy’s room in her life, and _this_ will be the first time she is? Alone with the boy she’s likely got a basket full of burdensome unrequited feelings for?

He’s not even one for group studying. He’s made that abundantly clear. And even if he were, the last thing he’d be studying for would be general chemistry. It’s a piece of cake for the both of them, and they both know it.

Why, then, would he want to study with her, unless he just craved more of her company?

This is a terribly tempting train of thought. She’s properly yearning now.

Oh, but it’s so hard to be rational right now. They’re both the youngest people in this bloody university. She needs a friend, desperately, and she thinks he does too. And at this point, Jemma is worried that, even if she doesn’t turn out to be his soulmate, she won’t be able to stay away from him.

Fitz is already the best friend she has right now. She came into this school knowing no one. She doesn’t get along with the other girls in her suite – they’re more worried about going to mixers to meet potential hook-ups than about coursework. Perhaps there’s a dorm on campus with a cleverer crowd, but she wasn’t lucky enough to be placed in it. May is, of course, an exception – she’s brilliant and kind and to be honest, a feminist icon. But with the age difference between them, she’s more of a mentor, an older sister perhaps, than a mate. Really, the only other person she considers a friend is a few hours’ flight away.

Jemma sighs. No matter what Fitz had asked her to do, she wouldn’t have turned him down. She’s a bit addicted to his presence already.

It’s not how she expected their first interaction outside the lab would go, but maybe this will be good. If she knows anything about either of them, they won’t end up studying general chemistry. Perhaps tonight will simply be a step forward in building a friendship.

That’s really all she wants. If it were up to her, she and Fitz would spend all their time together. Walk each other to each class and eat their meals together and stay up late binging TV shows until it was time to sleep.

Okay, maybe _occasionally_ she also imagines having a little more. Holding hands as they walk each other to their classes. Cuddling in one of their beds, long after Netflix has paused itself from inactivity. Snogging. Maybe.

She mostly attributes that last one up to her curiosity about lips, themselves. Generally speaking, people seems to enjoy kissing, she wants to see for herself what all the fuss is about.

But, truthfully, even if her lips were already functional, there’s only one person she’d be remotely interested in kissing, and that’s Fitz. She often finds herself glancing at his mouth, trying to imagine what it’d feel like against hers. That has got to mean something, but Jemma chooses not to dwell on it. If she can simply be Fitz’s best friend, and he can be hers, she’d be the happiest girl in the world.

She’s been sceptical her entire life about this soulmate business, failing to see how the blind eyes of nature could possibly match any individual up with someone supposedly perfectly suited for them when they’ve never met. But right now, she’s got to hand it to the universe. Whether or not she’s Fitz’s soulmate, he is the sort of person she can see spending the rest of her life with, regardless of the context – friends, colleagues, partners, lovers. After all, a soulmate doesn’t come with a list of relationship requirements or deadlines. She just wants to be with him, regardless of what does or doesn’t unfold in the future.

Though she’s only known him a mere four weeks, she simply doesn’t want to picture a future that doesn’t have him in it.  

She understands perfectly, now, how her uncle Jeff wound up in the situation he did. Jemma is falling for Fitz more and more every time she sees him. Her heart is powerless to resist his pull; like it’s merely a scrap of iron and he’s a supermagnet. All she can really do for now is accept that truth, and hope she isn’t chasing down a similar fate by going up to his room tonight.

 

 

\-----

 

 

Of the two hundred and forty minutes between leaving the lab and the time Jemma is supposed to arrive, about thirty minutes are spent tidying up his room, and another thirty grabbing dinner from the nearby Mediterranean food truck. But most of the remaining hundred and eighty are spent panicking about what on Earth he’s going to say, what they’re going to do, when they both realize neither of them actually needs to study for this exam.

He walks down to the lobby of his building ten minutes before eight, loitering the common area but never taking a seat or engaging with any of the other boys already there.

But about five minutes ‘til, he realizes how stupid it was to come down here early. She’ll be able to see right in the windows at night, for one thing, and even if she doesn’t catch sight of him, she’ll probably guess he was down here when he opens the door five seconds after she texts him. Either way, she’ll think he has nothing better to do than sit down here waiting for her to arrive. He doesn’t, but he doesn’t want her to know that.

He races back upstairs, taking the steps a few at a time. Collapsing on his bed, he does his best to pretend he isn’t staring at his phone waiting for her text to come through.

It’s not until 8:05 that it does.

_Here!_

That moment, though, he realizes his room is _too_ immaculate. All his things are put away: more damning evidence he was doing nothing before she got here than waiting for her to arrive. Scrambling to his feet, he pulls his laptop out of his bag and sets it on his desk, flipping open the lid and mashing in his password. The last few things he worked on are still open, and he leaves it that way satisfactorily. He pulls out the latest drone prototype, too, and some of the sheets of paper he was using last, fanning them out next to the computer. Good enough.

_Coming down now!_ He texts back.

But when he turns around, Jemma is standing in his doorway.

Fitz just about jumps out of his skin, his phone fumbling out of his hand and thumping to the floor.

“Jemma,” he gasps out, bending down to pick it up. “Hey.” Stashing it in his pocket, he crosses his arms as casually as he can manage.

“Some bloke let me in on his way out,” she explains, pointing her thumb vaguely behind her.

“Right, yeah,” he nods, trying not to hyperventilate.

There’s a short moment of awkward silence where Fitz isn’t sure where to start.

“What’s this you’re working on, then?” asks Jemma, pointing to the prototype on the desk as she takes a few steps into the room.

“Oh, this is the latest prototype of the drone,” he says.

She sets her backpack down and stares down at it, seemingly intrigued.

“Can I?” she asks, holding out her hands.

“Sure,” he says. “Just, you know, be careful.”

He explains some of the functions it’s already got, the ones that have bugs and the ones that don’t quite work at all. She points to everything and asks questions, sometimes finishing his sentences when she figures it out before he’s done explaining.

“And here are some things I haven’t added yet,” he says, flipping through the papers scattered around the desk. “But I want to. Main thing is flying, haven’t quite been successful with that. Quite a few past versions have crashed on their test flights. I’m hoping some of my courses here will provide some insight. I’ve got aerodynamics next semester, that should be good.”

“Fitz, this is amazing,” she says, setting it back down gently. “You should be chuffed.”

“Well, it doesn’t quite work yet.”

“Still. The applications could be endless.”

“You think so?”

“Absolutely. Just imagine how much safer and more efficient this would make testing sites of nuclear or biological disaster, how many lives could be saved...” she muses, seeming genuinely impressed. It makes his stomach do happy little somersaults.

“Well, if you’re interested, I could use a biochemist’s help on it. I was thinking of adding some biochemical functions, reading life signs, scanning for DNA, that sort of thing.”

“Oh, I’d love to! Anyway I can.”

“Okay. Excellent. I probably won’t do any more work on it tonight, but...”

“Let me know.”

“I will, yeah.”

“So...” Jemma says, stooping down to open up her bag. “About this exam, then.” She pulls out a notebook and their chemistry textbook. Holding them both in her arms, she waltzes straight over to his bed and plops herself down. “What do you want to go over first?”

He settles into his desk chair, not daring to sit on the bed with her. A recipe for disaster, that is.

When he only mumbles out a few ‘ehm’s, Jemma decides to start with how to read the periodic table.

Whether it’s because of the look on his face or his poor attempt to struggle with his answers, it’s only about forty-five seconds before Jemma can’t keep the façade anymore.

“You know, it doesn’t really seem like you need any help studying,” she accuses with a wry smile, slapping the textbook closed for effect.

“Doesn’t seem like you do, either.” He tries to emulate her gentle teasing but isn’t sure if he succeeds.

“Why’d you invite me to study, then?” she narrows her eyes, and he might be afraid she’s upset, but there’s a hopeful tune in her voice.

“You were the one who kept going on about studying,” he says, nonchalant. “I was just trying to do things your way.” He smiles, and to his surprise, Jemma does, too. The smallest smirk that turns into a proper grin.

“Because it works,” she insists. “So, if not with Gen chem, how else can we help each other?” she asks, setting the materials down and setting her hands in her lap.

Fitz thinks about it for a moment. There is this dreadful paper for biochem he’s just finished up that he doesn’t feel is his best work.

“Well, actually, we’ve got this assignment in biochem. A research proposal – a fake one, of course – that I’m pretty sure is just rubbish right now. I’m sure your insight would help, if you’d be willing to read it over.”

“Hmm...” Jemma screws up her face, thinking. Like she’s about to name her price. “Only if you’ll help me with my p-chem homework,” she counters.

“Deal,” he says, immediately. He swivels in his chair, pulling up the proposal on his computer.

“How long is it?” Jemma asks, hopping off the bed and coming up behind him.

“Only five pages. Nothing too serious.”

“And what exactly do you want me to look for?”

“I dunno.” He shrugs. “Anything that raises a red flag, really.”

“Fair enough.” He hands her the laptop, careful their hands don’t collide. He can’t risk an accidental touch dissolving his self control, letting one touch turn into many and outing himself before he’s ready. Tonight is important, it _has_ to be, but not like that.

His computer in hand, she returns to her spot on his bed, perching it on her lap.

“Where’s this p-chem assignment, then?” he asks. “Might as well see what I’m up against while you do that.”

“Oh, right. In my bag, there’s another textbook. It’s chapter five, problems one through twenty.”

As instructed, he fishes it out of her bag, and settles back into his desk as he turns to the proper page.

Ah. Should be simple enough.

Jemma finds a few places where he needs to alter his experimental setup to account for the extra variability where living things are concerned.

“Precisely why I’m not a biologist,” he quips, swiftly making all the changes she has highlighted in the text.

All Fitz really has to do is explain molecular orbitals in a different way than her professor did. A couple of drawings on scratch paper later, and it clicks for Jemma.

“Fitz, that’s amazing. I wish Russo had explained it like this.”

“Well, it’s a bit easier if you have several semesters’ worth of physics down.”

“And you’ve got that, have you?”

“I took classes at a local community college in high school,” he admits. “Some chemistry, but mostly physics.”

“So did I!” she says, seeming elated by the fact. “Except, not mostly physics. Mostly biology,” she says, seeming proud of that fact. “I did take a few chem courses, though. I actually shouldn’t be in Gen chem at all, already took two semesters’ worth. The university just recently changed its curriculum and said they –”

“Wouldn’t accept the bloody units,” Fitz finishes the sentence with her.

“Me too,” he says, in awe.

If not for the university changing its Gen chem policy this very year, he’d have never met Jemma. If it didn’t feel like fate before, it certainly does now.

“Wow,” she breathes, staring at him almost as though she’s feeling the same thing. “Anyway, you’re right,” she continues, changing her tone. “I shouldn’t be taking it without two semesters of physics first. They’re letting me break a couple rules so I can finish early.”

“Yeah, me too. How fast do you want to finish?”

“Three years, I hope.”

“Me too.”

This is too weird.

With anyone else, he might see it as insufferable bragging, someone going on about how much further ahead they are than everyone else. But it’s not insufferable when she does it. She gets it. Being too clever for their class. For anyone to want to hang around you.

Done with their coursework for now, the conversation shifts to talking more about themselves. Their move to America, how many grades they each skipped, how long their state forced them to wait before they could start high school. 

They’re both looking into grad programs already. She lists off the ones she’s considering – some medical schools, some doctoral programs in biochemistry. He tells her about the NASA fellowship he’s interested in, where he can intern while he finishes his doctorate, and be guaranteed a job when he’s done. Even before he moved to the States, he thought it would be cool to work for NASA. Now that he has a rather compelling reason to stay in the country, it sounds all the more appealing.

Fitz gets so caught up in talking to her, he forgets one of the main reasons why he invited her here tonight. He was supposed to be brave, to take a leap, but he’s no closer to finding out her soulmate status than he was the afternoon he met her. It’s just so easy to talk to her. To _be_ with her. He can forget that she’s his soulmate, and that it’s supposed to be stressful, when he’s with her. It’s only when he forces himself to think about it, and exerts that pressure on himself, that it ever becomes burdensome. Interacting with Jemma is nothing but pleasant. He’s certain he’s never enjoyed spending time with someone so much.

She’s sitting back against the wall now, making use of his back cushion, her legs stretched across the width of his bed. He’d really love to climb up next to her, instead of being pinned to his chair as he is now.

But he’s been dying to steal a touch all night. To wrap his arm around her, hold her hand, stroke her cheek, let her rest her head on his chest.

So he couldn’t possibly put himself in such close proximity. Especially when there’s no supervision around. No one else to stop him if he can’t stop himself. They’re simply study partners, for now. Hardly even friends yet. He cannot go mucking this up by letting his self-control slip.

In the middle of a lull in their conversation, just as Fitz is starting to consider actually bringing up the topic of soulmates, Jemma pulls picks up her phone, and turns on the screen.

“Oh, shoot. It’s nearly ten. I should get going.”

“Right,” he nods, trying not to sound like she’s pulled out a rug from beneath him. Two hours have passed? How is it already ten???

“Don’t want to get you in trouble,” she adds. She leaps off his bed, gathering the things she’s scattered about.

He stands while she puts her things away, thinking it’d be ruder to sit than to stand. Still, he isn’t sure what to do. His hands clench and unclench in the air, fidget with his clothes. What does he normally do with them, for God’s sake? He must look ridiculous.

She swings her backpack on, but stands several feet away. She’s fidgeting, too, and looks almost troubled. She’s not meeting his eyes, but nor is she looking away from him; her eyes are fixed on his shirt. Her mouth is half open, like she wants to say something, but her knees are bent, like she’s about to make a run for it. Could she be having the same internal dilemma he is?

Is it at least _possible_?

Suddenly, though, her gaze snaps up to his, and she smiles. All traces of nervousness gone.

“Thanks for helping me with that p-chem assignment.”

“Yeah, you too. I mean, with biochem. Yeah.” Is he always this inarticulate around her? He drops his eyes to the floor, internally kicking himself.

Before he realizes what she’s doing, she’s walking up to him. Holding out her hand. From the looks of it, expecting a handshake.

He takes her hand without thinking.

It’s softer than their first handshake the day they met. Neither of them moves their arm at all, they just hold each other’s hand for a couple fleeting, perfect seconds, and before Jemma lets go, she brushes her thumb just lightly over the back of his hand. Just as always, it steals his breath away.

“Good luck on the test,” she says, almost too brightly.

Before he can even muster up enough syllables for a response, she’s gone.

It’s only when she’s out of sight that he realizes how odd it is to use a handshake for a farewell, in any context perhaps except a business deal.

He’s not complaining. It was a very enjoyable handshake. He runs his left thumb over where hers had brushed along his right hand, gently expanding his range of sensation in a mere moment. It’s just... why did she do it?

Could it be...?

He’s still staring at the open door where she left, and not a full minute has passed when a figure steps into it.

It’s Phil, crossing his arms and leaning against the frame. “So?”


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you guys enjoy :) 
> 
> To my d/r fans, /really/ hoping to get back to EP soon. Thank you for your continued patience.

As Jemma heads to the lecture hall early Thursday morning, coming off a second fairly sleepless night, she’s actually looking forward to taking an exam. Maybe for at least twenty minutes or so, she can devote her mind to something other than Fitz and her utterly hopeless infatuation with him. How badly she’d embarrassed herself Tuesday night.

They never sit together in lecture, and the hall is so big she never even sees him unless she purposely looks for him, so she doesn’t need to be worried about accidentally running into him. She arrives ten minutes early, like always, to secure a seat in the front row. The hall fills up slowly as people trickle in, and for lack of anything else to do, she hunches over her desk and goes through some notes last minute, even though she doesn’t need to. Chemical equilibrium? Balancing chemical equations? This stuff is child’s play.

When someone settles noisily into the seat next to her close to the exam start time, she fights back the urge to sigh.

Though this class nearly fills out the spacious lecture hall, it’s rare that she has someone seated directly next to her. Down at the very front, the seats are clustered together in pairs rather than rows, and so far it’s been the trend that of the fifty or so empty seats in the hall when their class is sin session, the front row are some of the least desirable seats. But of course, the exam day, someone just _had_ to.

She keeps her head down and her eyes trained on her notebook, trying not to be annoyed. They probably just want to turn their exam in first, whoever they are. Get out faster in the scramble to turn in the exams at the end. Or maybe it’s someone from her lab section who intends to copy off her Scantron.

“Hey.”

Jemma’s heart stops.

_Oh._

It’s Fitz.

Of _course_ it’s Fitz. She glances down at his trainers, too scared to look at his face. After what she did last night, how can she? He must be sitting here to give her a lecture on social etiquette: that it’s not acceptable to intimately stroke someone’s hand with one’s thumb. Maybe even to friend-break-up with her. Well. At least she got one last touch before he did.

“Oh! Hey, Fitz,” she says, looking up at him. She smiles and tries to play it casual, to pretend what happened that night didn’t happen. Not trusting her greedy hands in the slightest, she only allows herself one very brief glance at his glacier blue eyes and pinchable cheeks before she stares back down at her notes.

“Ready for this?” he asks, nodding to the professor as he struggles through the nearby double doors with a giant box of fresh exams.

Okay. Perhaps he’s not here for a lecture, then. Maybe she hasn’t buggered her chances. Fitz can’t have meant it as a serious question, so she doesn’t give him a serious answer.

“I hope so,” she says with faux nervousness. They both chuckle a bit.

Jemma feels longing swelling in her chest again. What they have right now is so nice. She’s always wound tightly with anxiety right up until she sees Fitz, but once they start talking, it’s easy. Enjoyable. Effortless, really. It’s only when she’s in solitude, spiralling within her own thoughts, or trying to pressure herself to pry for answers, that any panic sets in. Being around Fitz, himself, is never anything less than wonderful.

Which is why it would really, really be a misfortune if he ended things with her because he found out she’s got a stupid soulmate crush on him. He’s her only friend here.

How is she going to endure this class period, though? Take an easy exam while he’s sitting here, perfectly touchable right next to her? These desks are so damn small they’ll likely be nudging elbows the whole time.

“Jemma, I wanted to ask you –”

Before Fitz can get out whatever the question is, the professor is calling the class to order. It’s officially time for the exam. Everyone shuts up in an instant, and with the professor mere feet away, eyes peeled for cheaters as he hands stacks of exams to a group of TAs, there’s no way he can finish it, even in a whisper. She looks over to him with a guilty look, her mouth pulling down into a grimace.

_Sorry._ She mouths.

He holds a hand up in the universal gesture of ‘it’s all right.’

It’s the longest thirty minutes of her life, she’s sure of it. The pencil is too hard between the bones of her fingers. The paper is too coarse. And, though she can’t feel anything there yet, she can plainly see every time Fitz’s arm touches hers. Every time, her mind empties of general chemistry for the solid thirty seconds she spends wishing she could tell him the truth or that they weren’t both wearing long sleeves. And every time she has to start whichever problem she was on over again.

A test that’d normally take fifteen minutes takes her double that.

Fitz, at least, seems equally anxious. He’s had to scrub his eraser over his papers many times, and has exhaled as loudly as someone who’s starting to realize they’re bombing the exam. And the way he keeps wipes his palms on his shirt is not as surreptitious as he probably thinks it is.

Is he always this nervous during exams that are too easy for him, or are these behaviours being caused by sitting next to her?

Well, she supposes she shouldn’t be one to talk, because she’s doing all of those things, too. Only rubbing her palms on her trousers instead of her shirt.

Fitz’s cologne smells good. Clean water and pine trees. Or is it his aftershave? She’ll have to ask one day.

No!!! She’s getting ahead of herself. He’s not her boyfriend. He’s her friend. Barely that. She cannot ask him any such thing. 

He finishes about a minute before she does, evident by the way he closes the exam packet with his Scantron tucked inside. But he just absently picks at the edges of the exam pages, brushes stray eraser shavings off his desk. Waiting for her to finish, too, no doubt. She’s not going to get out of answering whatever question is coming, evidently, no matter how long she takes.

She might as well get it over with now, then. She closes her exam booklet and folds down her desk so she can escape her chair. Once she drops it in the box (the first exam there), she turns around to see Fitz approaching the desk too. She has half a mind to grab her bag, race out the nearest door, and hope he’s not a fast runner.

But she had just said herself – or thought it at least – he’s her friend. Her only one right now. She shouldn’t let potentially unrequited feelings ruin what they have if he’s not going to. And the only way to find out whether he intends to is by talking to him. Letting him get this question out, whatever it may be.

They gather their things together as silently as possible and head for the nearest door. Several students glare in their direction on their way out, but that’s no surprise. She gets glares everywhere she goes. It’s hard to stay unnoticed when you look so obviously younger than everyone else. Constantly reminding everyone else of their painfully average intelligence simply by existing isn’t a great way to befriend classmates. Another reason she ought to be grateful for Fitz.

When they step outside, it’s really a lovely morning. Chilly but not cold, scattered fluffy clouds in the blue sky that don’t block the bright sunshine. It smells like the copious trees that surround them and birds are chirping. Normally, such pleasant things don’t make her feel so nauseous. It must just be Fitz being so close by, at an hour when she doesn’t normally see him. It’s throwing off her homeostasis.

“So, ah… any plans?” he asks, fidgeting with his hands and not meeting her eyes.

She can’t help but giggle with a rush of relief. _This_ was his question?

“Plans for what?” she asks.

His pace slows down as he screws up his face, evidently not expecting her to ask for clarification.

“Breakfast?” he shrugs, looking over at her. “I’m a bit peckish.”

Jemma can’t believe it. She’d love nothing more than to get breakfast with him right now. For one thing, she never gets in a proper meal on Thursday mornings: chem first thing at 8, micro lab nine ‘til noon. But more than that... oh, she could just shake her fist at the cosmos right now. Fitz seems completely unfazed over what happened on Tuesday. She thought she’d cocked up their relationship forever, but he wants to get _breakfast_ , where it’d be just the two of them together without the slightest pretence of anything coursework-related. At the very least, he doesn’t hate her. At best, maybe he actually requites some level of interest. And she has to _decline_!

It takes a lot of effort not to wistfully sigh like a girl from a sappy film.

“I’ve got micro lab in twenty minutes,” she says, frowning.

“Right…” he nods. “Which way’s that?”

“Meyer hall.” She points in that direction. “Just across the way.”

“Right.” He starts walking that way, and she follows.

“What about you?” she asks, trying to sound casual. Or at least, to not sound like she only wants to know so that she can daydream about him accurately throughout this three-hour lab.

“Hmm?” he asks, looking up from whatever had his focus on the ground.

“What other classes have you got today?”

“Ehm, biochem at eleven, mechatronics lab at two, numerical analysis at five.”

“Busy day.”

“Yeah.” He nods.

“My schedule’s a bit mad, too. After micro I’ve got genetics at three, then my p chem lab at four.”

“That’s what we get for signin’ up for twenty-two units each, hmm?” He turns to her, smiling a bit.

“Suppose so.” Her lips turn up in sync with his. She smiles so much around him it makes her cheeks hurt.

“So, ehm, what time’s that p-chem lab over?” he asks as they approach the entrance to Meyer.

“Seven.”

“Yeah, I’ll be out by then, too.” He nods. They come to a stop next to the stairs up to the door of the building, and he exhales heavily, clenching his hands together. His eyes are fixed on the cement steps, and he looks about as nervous as she feels. “We could, er... get... dinner then, maybe? Instead?” Only once he’s finally gotten the whole sentence out does he glance up at her again.

“Yeah.” She smiles again. “Definitely.” Wow. This morning has taken quite a turn for the better. “Want to meet in the Caf at, say, seven thirty?” she suggests, to prevent him having to struggle to stutter out yet another question.

“Yeah. Yeah, perfect. Okay. See you then.”

“’Kay.” She beams at him. With a little wave, he turns around and starts back down the path they came.

She watches him go for several moments, until she starts to worry he’ll turn around and catch her staring after him.

It’s only when she pushes through the door of the building that she realizes _he’d just walked her to class._ Something only yesterday seemed an impossible fantasy. The only thing missing was holding his hand.

In time, perhaps.

The constantly fluttering in her stomach and daydreams about their first dinner date make it nearly impossible to focus during her lab. She nearly bumps her neighbour’s lab coat with an inoculating loop full of Salmonella, and accidentally spreads _S. mutans_ onto her blood agar instead of _S. pyogenes_.

At least in this lab, she gets to work alone. Partnering with anyone but Fitz in a laboratory setting is nothing but a hindrance to productivity.

But even if her life – or worse, her grade in this course – depended on it, she couldn’t stop thinking about him.

After lab, she pulls out her phone and pulls up the RA schedule to check May’s hours. She’s there from one ‘til three. Jemma needs to go talk to her about tonight. May isn’t the best at conversation, but she had helped a great deal to ease her anxiety about Fitz. Maybe she can do the same for this dinner.

 

\-----

 

“I talked with Jemma again this afternoon,” May says, spearing another bite of broccoli beef with her fork.

“About Fitz?” asks Phil through a mouthful of orange chicken.

May nods. “They’re having dinner tonight.”

Phil swallows down his bite, and smiles from ear to ear.

“What?” May asks, narrowing her eyes.

Phil shakes his head innocently “I’m just proud of him. I told him he should ask her.”

“You did?”

“Well, not specifically. But I gave him a little nudge.” Phil shrugs, playing completely innocent.

“You didn’t tell him you know, did you?” May points her fork at him accusingly.

Phil shakes his head. “Of course not. That’s something they have to discover on their own. Wouldn’t be magical if we spoiled it.”

May smirks, shaking her head as she digs into her fried rice.

They eat in silence for a few moments, both enjoying their food too much to take many pauses. Both their budgets uncomfortably tight, it’s not often they treat themselves to meals that haven’t come from the Caf or their freezer. But Phil passing his qualifying exam with flying colors is more than enough reason to splurge.

“So what’d you tell Jemma?” Phil asks.

May shrugs. “Same thing you told Fitz. She needs to find out if this runs both ways.”

Phil lets out a happy sigh. “I’m rootin’ for those kids.”

“Think tonight will be the night?” May asks.

“Guess we’ll find out.”


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was so freakin' slammed this week (and looking forward to an awesome weekend of more working), and it was honestly just so great to sink back into this universe for an hour while I was editing. If it makes any of you half as happy as it makes me, I'd be content :)

Fitz arrives at the Caf a few minutes later than they’d agreed upon. His first instinct was to arrive early just to be safe (and polite), but he’d quickly talked himself out of that plan, knowing he would just drive himself mad waiting around for Jemma. But after ambling through the entire dining hall surreptitiously scanning for her until it’s nearly seven forty, he concludes she’s not arrived yet.

He pulls out his phone, desperately hoping he hadn’t somehow missed a text from her that she had to cancel. But when his notifications are blank, he tells himself he’s being silly. She’ll come. The large cafeteria is crowded, but one table against the nearby wall remains empty. He hurries over to it and sits down, eyes trained on the door waiting for her to walk in.

At least a hundred brown-haired women about Jemma’s height walk through the door, and his heart leaps into his throat every time.

He finally spots her hurrying through the door a few minutes later, and for a moment he swears his heart stops beating altogether. His memories can still never do her justice. Her hair is let down and windswept (which he’s still not used to, as most of his time with her has been spent in the lab where she’s required to have it done up), and she’s wearing a black peacoat he’s never seen her wear before. It is a bit chilly out this evening, and the wind has picked up substantially since this morning.

Once she scans in with the attendant, she glances around quickly, searching for him. He stands, holding up a hand, and she smiles from ear to ear when she sees him. He wants to run to her and take her in his arms and twirl her around. It feels like it’s been days since he’s seen her, though it was only just this morning. But he restrains himself, walking at a normal pace to meet her.

He almost does touch her though, though. His hand reaches out of its own accord, itching to just feel her hand or her coat or _something_ , but he regains control and retracts it before it gets halfway.

“Hey, Fitz.” There it is again. It’s like she enjoys saying his name.

“Hey,” he says simply, stuffing the offending hand in his pocket for good measure.

“Sorry I’m a few minutes late. Went home to get a coat. I was freezing.”

“Don’t worry,” he assures her. “I just got here,” he lies.

They agree that pizza is the least disappointing dish in the cafeteria, and each grab a couple slices and some salad.

Both of them are quite hungry from a long day of classes and walking all over campus, so they don’t cover much other than small talk as they eat. They discover they both watch Elementary, and prefer it to the BBC’s incarnation of the character, and that they both enjoy most other Marvel content (besides Spider-man, which they’d already discussed). His favourite hero is Tony (“he’s an _engineer_ , Jemma,” Fitz defends his selection); hers is Bruce Banner.

“He’s just as clever as Tony,” Jemma explains, “and there’s just something so fascinating about a reversible physiological change on that scale. And all that power. Not realistic, perhaps, but... fascinating.”

When they’re done eating, Jemma pushes her plate to the side and folds her hands on the table, and he can’t help but mirror the movement. Really, it’s only a couple inches across to touch her hand. Fantasies flood his mind of reaching across the distance, covering her hand with his and holding it for longer than a second. His hands unclasp as though he might actually do it this time, but before he can advance his hand an inch, he realizes he’d missed a question she asked.

“Fitz?”

“Hmm?” He yanks his hand back, almost hitting himself in the face with it.

“I asked if you’re involved in any research on campus?” she chuckles, apparently giving him the benefit of the doubt for why he’d zoned out.

“Oh, er, not yet. But I’m interested in a project Professor Xu’s lab. Robotics.”

“Not like… robots?” she asks, wary.

“No.” he can’t help but chuckle despite himself. “Nothing ‘Terminator.’ Mostly data collection and maintenance machines for aircrafts and spacecrafts.”

“Sounds perfect for you. And it’d be great for your C.V., applying to NASA, hmm?”

“Think so, yeah. What about you, any research you’re interested in?” He takes a giant gulp of his water to stop himself from trying to touch her again.

“Brewster’s lab sounds interesting. Pharmacological research. They’ve got some of the most advanced imaging equipment I’ve ever seen.”

“And you’ve seen a lot, have you?” he teases.

“I toured a lot of labs as a kid.”

Fitz grins, trying to imagine that. A Jemma half their age, peering through microscopes and reaching little gloved hands up on lab benches via connections her parents managed to get. He wishes he’d met her sooner. Oh, he wishes that.

“You’re judging me,” she assumes from his smile.

“No,” he assures her. “Not at all. I dragged my mum to the Smithsonian air and space museum, like, four times when we went to DC.”

“That’s not so bad.”

“We were only there a weekend,” he adds.

She laughs, and it’s the most beautiful sound in the world. If he could make her laugh every day, and nothing else, he’d consider himself lucky.

“Ugh…” she says, glancing at her phone. “I should get going. I’ve got a genetics lab report to finish, and a paper to start for history.”

“Oh,” is all he can manage to say. It’s the worst news he’s heard all day. He thought he still had plenty of time to ask her, well... what he’s been meaning to ask her.

She stands up. “Walk back with me? I do hate walking across campus alone after dark…”

He definitely wants to do that – walk her home – but his legs seem frozen at the moment. And his mouth, apparently. Pizza grease and something even heavier than that settling into his gut. Terror?

When she starts to look guilty for asking, he snaps out of it and scrambles to his feet.

“Yeah,” he squeaks out. “Of course.”

The lengthy walk will at least give him time, and they’ll have a bit more privacy outside the cafeteria, he imagines. Perhaps this is for the best. He loops his backpack onto his shoulder, and gestures for her to lead the way.

But time to think about how to ask her if he’s her soulmate doesn’t ease his anxiety. In fact, it amplifies it by about a thousand. They talk idly some more about labs they’re interested in joining, but Fitz is having trouble paying attention to what she’s saying. She’s normally so easy to talk to, but that’s different right now, as he’s panicking about what to say in between each word she says.

By the time they’re approaching her building, he thinks he very well might be properly sick in the nearby bushes.

Why do this to himself? Maybe he should just wait, and it’ll come out naturally. Is it worth all the stress to find out as soon as possible?

Phil’s voice pops into his head.

_The longer you wait, the worse it’ll be if it’s not the answer you want._

He’s right.

“I say we make a pact,” Jemma says, slowing her walking pace to a near crawl. “By the end of the semester, we both have to talk to the professors we want to work for. What d’you say?”

“Agreeable terms.” He nods, swallowing hard.

“Good.” She finally comes to a stop just by the side door to her dormitory, and fiddles with the card key on her lanyard. “Thanks for walking me back.”

“Don’t mention it.”

She can probably see him sweating. Can she?

“See you in lab?”

“Yeah.” He nods, without thinking. He wants to ask her _so bad_ , but the words are stuck in his throat. Lower than that, actually, somewhere in his gut with his dinner. But something’s about to come back up; he just hopes it’s words and not partially digested food.

She starts to swivel around, and he dives after her. Grabs her by the hand without a second thought.

“Jemma, wait.”

It feels so good to hold her hand again, he squeezes it, and she turns back to him with a gasp. He stares down at their joined hands, rubbing his thumb over her skin. It’s smooth, cold from the night air. Fits so well inside his. Unable to resist, he brings his left hand to hers as well, gently enclosing her cold hand in both of his. His palm and fingers tingle as she wriggles her fingers just slightly, dormant nerves coming to life with the subtle touch. And in a mere moment, he has two sensitive hands (at least, the insides of them).

Torn, he lets out a heavy sigh, so content in her touch yet so afraid.

It’s only when he looks up at her again that he realizes she’s looking down at their hands, too, and there’s moisture in her eyes. There’s fear there, like she’s terrified of what he might say.

“That first chemistry lab, when we met. Did you –” he closes his mouth, losing his nerve, or the right words, maybe both.

There’s a long pause, where he wants to imagine she’s lifting the end of that sentence from his mind, but he’s probably reading it all wrong. She waits a while for him to finish the thought, but he never does.

“Did I what?” she asks in barely a whisper.

“Was it... the fist time you… felt...”

Half expecting her to leave, his his hands to drop to his sides. He closes his eyes, not wanting to have to watch her walk away.

But she doesn’t leave. Instead, she says a single word that changes his life forever.

“Yeah.”

“Oh,” he breathes, his eyes flying open. “Jemma.”

She nods infinitesimally, like she’s afraid to be too emphatic. She looks so fragile: her eyes shining, bottom lip wobbling, as though she could shatter to pieces any moment.

“Please tell me it was for you, too.” Her voice is brittle and desperate, breaking on a few of the words.

Oh! Like he’d ever have led her on like that.

“It was.” He nods enthusiastically, smiling in an attempt at reassurance.

“Oh, Fitz.”

This is a phrase she uses somewhat often. But this isn’t like all the other times she’s said it in exasperation when they’re bickering in the lab. This one is soft and joyful and filled with relief. She brings her other hand up to touch one of his, an invitation to hold it properly again.

“I can’t believe it’s you.” She stares up at him for a moment, wonder and relief glistening in her eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” she squeezes his hands, suddenly frustrated.

“Why didn’t you?” he counters.

Jemma lets out a shaky breath, nodding. “Fair enough.”

They readjust their hands to intertwine their fingers, unlocking more sensation for one another as they do.

It’s easy, this time, free of the usual guilt and anxiety of knowing he only has a fraction of a second to enjoy it before he has to pull away. He can hold her hands, rubs his thumbs on her skin as long as he wants, and she can do the same. For once, they’re experiencing this _together_. And though they’re only holding hands, standing out in the cold a foot apart from each other, it’s already better than he could’ve imagined. Knowing he is really, truly Jemma’s soulmate and she’s his... all the accumulated stress of five weeks of uncertainty has evaporated in an instant.

They both enjoy a comfortable silence, wriggling their fingers and enjoying the simple pleasure of a touch that doesn’t have an expiration date of two seconds. It’s more than pleasant, in fact: it’s heavenly. Whether or not he ever admitted it, it’s what he’s spent his life waiting for.

In all the years before he met Jemma, he imagined it would be an adjustment learning to grow accustomed to a new sense, if he ever obtained it. But he had never entertained thoughts of a real, living, person at the other end of this elusive connection. It’s a statistical improbability if there ever was one. A sixth of the population has a living soulmate, and only a fraction of those ever meet each other. For the first time in his life, Fitz feels lucky. The bloody _cosmos_ wants them to be together.

Who is he to argue with the universe?

“So, you’ve got work to do?” he asks, casually hoping she’ll change her mind about leaving him for the night.

“It can wait,” she suggests. But she looks down at the ground, scrunching up her nose. He knows her well enough by now to know that it actually can’t.

“I could… do some homework too,” he offers. “We wouldn’t be working together, necessarily, but at least in the same room.”

Jemma does, indeed, look very pleased that he’s offered this solution.

“I’d like that.”

If she smiles at him like this much longer, his heart may just give out.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's winding down now! Only a couple of chapters left :) I hope you guys enjoy this one - I sort of flailed at it just editing it. <3

The only real places to sit in Jemma’s dorm room are the single chair at Jemma’s desk and, of course, the bed. As soon as she lets Fitz in, they both loiter in the centre of the room for a few awkward seconds, as Jemma wonders what sort of seating arrangement she should propose. Repeating her tactic from the previous night, she walks over to her bed and takes a seat on it, wondering if he’ll follow her to it or choose the desk.

He chooses the desk again, pulling out the chair and setting down his bag before he slumps into it.

“Nice room,” he comments, glancing around with a small nod.

“Thanks.” Jemma smiles. “You know, there’s extra chairs out in the common room,” she says, getting up but leaving her bag behind. “I’ll go and get one so I can sit with you.”

“Oh.” Fitz looks surprised at the suggestion, but nods. “All right, yeah. Sure.”

She drags in one of the chairs from around the table in the common room, but there’s simply no effective way to arrange two chairs around a small desk meant for one.

Realizing this quickly, Jemma sighs.

“Want to sit on the rug, here?” Fitz suggests before her heart can sink, nodding towards the floor.

“The floor?” she asks, scrunching up her nose.

“It looks cosy to me.” He shrugs.

It is plenty big enough; wanting to cover up as much of the cheap, industrial carpet lining the floors as possible, she’d purchased a big area rug on her very first shopping trip. It is rather plush, too, she’d discovered the first time she really touched it a few weeks ago. With any luck, it’ll be better than lying on the ground.

“Sure.” She smiles, focusing on the fact that this means Fitz wants to sit close to her enough that he’d gladly sit on the floor.

They both set up camp cross-legged, laptops and various materials fanned out in front of them.

“What are you gonna work on?” he asks, flipping open his laptop.

“A case study for genetics, first,” she says, opening hers, too. “And then a lab report for p-chem due tomorrow. What about you?” she asks.

“Lab report for biochem,” he says with a smile. “Not due ‘til next week though. Then some reading for mechatronics.”

“Oh, the cell fractionation lab with the rat livers, yeah?”

“Yep,” he says, pulling a face.

“Wasn’t too bad, I hope?”

“Thankfully Professor Honeycutt did the euthanasia. And I got my lab partner to do the dissection and smash up the liver.”

“What a cheater,” she teases.

“I learned how to use a flow cytometer!” his voice jumps up an octave, affronted. “That’s the important thing, isn’t it?”

“I suppose.” Jemma chuckles, staring down at the rug just to give herself a break from the sheer, cheek-aching euphoria of staring at him.

It’s just mind-boggling that he’s really _here_ , in her room. That she’s comfortable in the certainty that she’s his soulmate, knowing their whole lives are stretching out before them and that they’re destined to live them together... and being so bloody _happy_ about the prospect.

If someone had told her this was how her first semester at university would go before she arrived here, she would probably have slapped them in the face.

She glances back up at Fitz’s face. He’s resting his elbow on his knee, his head in his hand and just staring at her, glancing up and down with an unwavering smile and a kind of awe in his eyes.

“What?” she asks, getting bashful under his scrutiny.

“I still just... can’t believe it,” he admits, shaking his head.

“I know.” She sighs. “I’m so relieved. Oh, I’ve just been sick over it.”

“Me too,” he admits. He sounds almost glad to hear of her suffering, but she understands completely. In a way, she’s glad he was suffering the whole time, too. It means he wanted them to match up as badly as she did, and that knowledge is so, so reassuring. “When I was younger, I got... there was this bloke at school. He convinced me I was one of the screw-ups. I’ve always been afraid he was right.”

“Oh, Fitz.” She reaches her hand out to the one resting on his knee, and he takes it greedily, wrapping his hand around her and squeezing lightly. It’s a divine thing, being able to hold his hand without the clawing fear that she needs to let go immediately. His hand is so warm, and something about it being bigger and just a little stronger is comforting, makes her feel safe.

“My uncle,” she says quietly. “He _was_ one of the screw-ups,” Jemma uses Fitz’s term. “My aunt Emily was his soulmate, but she wasn’t his. Still, they ended up together, somehow. But ten years into their marriage, she left him for her proper soulmate. It crushed him. I’ve always been afraid of the same thing happening to me.”

“Oh, Jemma, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay. He’s doing better now. It took him a while, but, he’s got lots of family who love him.”

Fitz is sombre for a minute, gently stroking her hand with his thumb. “We’re lucky.”

“We are lucky,” she agrees.

They make it about five minutes into their respective assignments, when Jemma can’t contain her curiosity anymore.

“What did you do, when you left the lab that first day?” she asks, looking up from her screen again.

“Ran to the water closet and freaked the hell out,” he confesses. She giggles at his honesty. “You?”

“Same. Except I ran all the way back here before I started freaking out.” She borrows his choice of words again.

He chuckles, too.

It quickly devolves into a long conversation, what it was like when they left that chemistry lab that first Tuesday afternoon with a million new active synapses. Filling in the gaps of time the last month when they weren’t with each other. Explaining their approaches to acclimating to the world with their new sense. And, eventually, delving back into the past, talking about their lives up until that point, the struggles of living life without touch.

“It is so much easier to hold things now, isn’t it?” he says, after she tells the story of breaking the beaker.

“So much easier!”

“I, ehm, had a similar accident, actually,” he confesses. “I broke a bauble when I was a lad, sliced my hand up really good.”

“Damn glass,” Jemma says.

“I have a little scar on my palm still,” he says, holding out his hand.

Not at all inclined to pass up an opportunity to touch him, she takes it in both of hers, carefully inspecting it. Between the creases of his palm stretches a thin line of skin that’s lighter than the flesh surrounding it, raised just slightly, too, softly reflecting the light overhead when she gently rotates his hand. Gingerly, she runs a fingertip along the faded line, wishing she could go back in time and prevent little Fitz from hurting himself in the first place. She can hardly bear the thought of it.

Fitz sucks in a sharp breath, and Jemma pulls her hand back with a gasp.

“Sorry, did that hurt?” she asks.

“No, no,” he rushes out. “Er... just the opposite.”

“Yeah?” she asks, feeling her cheeks warm.

“Yeah.” His cheeks turn a little pink, too.

“Remind me where I’ve got you so far?” she asks, emboldened by his admission. She’s fairly sure she can list them off herself, but she wants to hear him recount it.

“Well, my right hand,” he starts. “That was first. At first it was just the inside of it, but now there’s a bit on the back, too.” He traces his fingers over the back of his hand, demonstrating where the spots are. Everywhere her fingers came around when they shook hands before, and when they held hands just outside.

“The inside of my left, now, too, that just happened downstairs,” he continues. “And some bits of my fingers, here, from when I borrowed your pen...” He narrows his eyes, cogs in his brain turning. “Did you... hand it to me like that on purpose?” he asks.

There’s no point in lying now. “Yeah,” she admits.

“I knew it,” he says, grinning.

“Then the third week, there was the hydrochloric acid snafu. Got me here,” he points to a specific area on his neck, then another. And taps the tip of his nose. “Were those on purpose too?” he asks, bolder.

She sighs, hating to be found out this way. “I was terribly curious, Fitz. I wanted to see how you’d react. But the nose _was_ an accident, I swear.”

“I’m disappointed in you, Jemma. Taking advantage of me like that, when I needed help, just to quench your own curiosity.” He shakes his head.

“I felt terrible about it straight away!” she says, even though she knows he’s kidding. “Especially since you barely reacted at all. I thought you must’ve thought I was some sort of creep!” At that, Fitz laughs out loud.

Once he stops laughing, he reassures her. “I did not think you were a creep. I thought they were _all_ accidental, so I was worried you’d think _I_ was the creep if I reacted at all.”

“We’re ridiculous, aren’t we?” she asks.

“Probably.” He shrugs. “I dunno though. We’re both scientists, aren’t we? We’re conditioned to assume the null hypothesis unless there’s adequate –”

“Evidence to reject it,” Jemma finishes his sentence with him, and it’s one of those times she’s reminded that he couldn’t be more suited to her if he tried. _Well done, universe_ , she can’t help but think fondly.

“Exactly,” he says. “Anyway, the only other one is from yesterday, the spot on my arm.” He brushes his hand over his cardigan in the exact spot she remembers touching him. “What was that one for?” he asks.

Jemma shrugs. “Fun.”

“Fair enough. What about you, then?” he asks, resting his chin on his fists, looking settled in for a long story.

She starts with her left hand, the inside of it, tracing where his fingers had curled around it, some spots on the backs of her knuckles, from where she touched his neck. Then the spot on her arm that had grazed his nose. She recalls her right hand last, the first and last thing he’s touched.

“This one, you’ve got almost everywhere.” She pauses, and they both avoid looking at each other. It’s strangely intimate, what they’re talking about, for only being friends. She traces her finger over the hand, searching for the few patches that are still numb. “Few spots missing still, though,” she breathes, almost afraid that he’ll hear her.

“Yeah?” he says, as though he’s taken it as the invitation she intended. “I could even it out for you. If you want,” he adds after a pause.

Jemma’s stomach swoops. She never expected such an offer tonight. Most of her dreams (both sleeping and waking) have been filled with scenarios just like this. Touching his hand again has literally been her biggest fantasy of the last five weeks. And as worried as she’s been up until this point about moving too fast, doing anything that might seem even vaguely non-platonic, much of that anxiety has faded over the course of the evening. Which leaves her with basically nothing to stop her from graciously accepting the offer.

“I’d like that,” she says, echoing her earlier statement outside.

It’s just as magical as it was the very first time.

Resting her palm on one of his hands (knowing that surface is already covered), he carefully brings his other hand to her skin. Starting with her pinkie finger, he effortlessly unlocks more and more of her sensory neurons with the gentlest touch. He uses mostly his thumb, grazing it along her skin in a way that assures her he’s been practicing as much as she has. He makes his way through her fingers to her thumb, then traces the back of her hand, slowing down when he reaches her wrist, savouring the last few centimetres of skin available to him.

To Jemma’s surprise, once he’s finished with the one hand, he nods over to her other, and she gives it to him without hesitation. He really takes his time with this one, knowing there’s more area to cover, as though he’s using the opportunity to learn the shape and texture of her hands. And this time, when he reaches her wrist, his thumb brushes just slightly under the sleeve of her jumper. It sends shivers all the way up her arms, even into her neck.

“How’s that?” he asks softly. Holding onto her fingers lightly, reluctant to let them go.

Flustered as she is, it takes her a moment.

“Think it’s even, yeah,” she squeaks out.

He waits a moment, stroking her thumb gently. She thinks he might ask her to return the favour, and she gets a bit anxious when he doesn’t. She rearranges their hands so his palm is resting on one of hers.

“Can I?” she asks, looking up at him.

He stares back like he’s nervous, but in a good way. All he can manage to do is nod.

She tries to mimic what he’d done, trying to keep it slow and steady and gentle. And she’s a bit chuffed with herself, because he has to close his eyes and take deep breaths several times while she does it. Even gasps a little, at one point, and she swears the hairs on his forearm stand up a bit. Though his sleeves are pushed up by a few inches, she doesn’t push her luck by going beyond the boundary he’d set, stopping when she reaches his wrists.

“Better?” she asks when she’s finished, going for her own version of flirtatious, but it sort of flops.

“Yeah, that’s... that’s better, yeah.” The words are all jumbled together. He nods with a failed attempt at nonchalance, and she instantly feels more at ease that she has no idea how to be charming.

Jemma pulls back, not wanting to make him uncomfortable by lingering. She wriggles her fingers, instead, and her hands feel so good and so _alive._ She suddenly finds herself wondering what it’d be like to spend the rest of the night helping each other expand their sensation beyond just their hands, experiencing this process over wider areas. It’s a bit disorienting, for someone who’s never devoted a single second to any sort of sensual fantasy before. Frightening, even. But this is only the first night they’ve known about each other. They have time to acclimate to this new world as slowly as they need to.

“We’ve both got two fully functional hands, now,” she says, brandishing them in front of her.

“It’s nice,” he agrees, copying her movements.

It’s at that moment that Jemma notices May is standing in her doorway. She doesn’t know how long she’s been watching, but Jemma dares to say she looks more than a bit pleased by what she sees.

“I really hate to break this up,” May says, just as Fitz looks up. “But it’s three minutes after ten.”


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Only one chapter left! Gosh I just love these kids. I'm going to miss them. I hope you guys like the way I'm wrapping this up.
> 
> Sorry if this feels a bit rough (it does to me). I have so much else going on I didn't dedicate as much time to polishing it as I normally would.

Fitz and Jemma quickly become inseparable. (That is, as much as their packed class schedules will allow.)

Of course, there’s Gen Chem lecture Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday (where they always sit together now), and their lab on Tuesday afternoon, so it’s really only Friday they have no _guaranteed_ time together. But regardless, they never go a full day without without seeing each other, no matter how busy.

The couple hours per week spent in the lab where they met almost seems trivial now, with how much time they spend together outside of it. For the first five weeks of the semester that lab was a lifeline they both clung to, the only thing that got them through the rest of the week. Now it’s mostly just an annoyance, like the lecture. They’d much rather be together outside of it. Whether it’s grabbing a quick bite at the Caf between classes, or just hanging out together while they work on different assignments in the evenings (right up until that pesky curfew imposed on the opposite sex), nearly all their free time outside of class is spent together.

Often, they help each other with their tougher assignments, swapping expertise and providing perspective and insight from their respective fields. Some nights, they work together on plans for biochemical tests for the drone. After only a few brainstorming sessions, they conclude there are too many functions in the works to include in one model, and start to divide up the functions into classes. When they end up with several, they give the new models the nicknames of dwarfs.

When they’re not directly working on school or their project, they’re usually holed up in one of their rooms, binging Netflix or playing video games together.

And though there’s not a whole lot of time in a busy class schedule for texting, they do make a point of texting one another funny anecdotes from their average-brained classmates whenever they get the chance.

_Girl literally just asked the professor a question about ‘Gill’s free energy’,_ Jemma had texted him from P-chem earlier this week.

_Bloke next to me just drew a carbon with five bonds and a positive charge in his lab notebook,_ Fitz had texted back from Biochem.

Oh, and they hold hands everywhere they go. After an (albeit short) lifetime without touch, neither of them likes the idea of living another day without it.

\---

Two weeks after they’ve revealed themselves to one another, they hug for the first time. It’s one of those rare days when they haven’t had a chance to meet up until their last classes end around seven, so it’s been almost twenty-one hours since they’ve seen each other. As soon as they spot each other across the cafeteria, Jemma runs to him, and Fitz can’t resist taking her in his arms after such a lonely day.

Thanks to all the bloody clothes they have to wear with the weather these days, it doesn’t yield any new sensation, save for one spot: Fitz’s ear just lightly grazes hers as they part ways. His hand flies to his ear reflexively, and he drops his eyes to the ground, stuttering out a few half-formed apologies for the mishap. But he stops feeling guilty as soon as he looks up at Jemma: her cheeks pink, touching her newly affected ear and smiling at him like he’s given her a gift.

\---

About a week after that, they’re in his dorm on a Saturday night, watching the latest episode of Elementary.

It isn’t exactly atypical for them to sit on his bed together anymore; they’d abandoned their initial qualms about its implications after only a few days of sitting uncomfortably on the floor. Neither is it atypical for them to hold hands occasionally while watching telly; it’s become somewhat automatic for them. But it is atypical for Jemma to be wearing short sleeves. Though it’s mid-October, there’s already an autumn chill in the air most days, so she’s usually wearing a jumper or long-sleeved shirt of some kind when they’re together in the evenings.

About ten minutes into the episode, Jemma rests her hand on the bed, and Fitz takes it almost immediately. As he expected, Jemma doesn’t think much of it, clasping her hand in his as naturally as ever. It’s easy, and comfortable, and it just feels _right._ Though it’s generally not considered a platonic activity, it’s never something he’s felt nervous or uncomfortable about doing. But Fitz can’t help staring down at her hand, fixated on how tonight it leads seamlessly into her arm. All that additional exposed skin, those neurons just waiting to be woken – no, for _him_ to wake them up – are properly distracting. Fitz wouldn’t be able to tell you the plot of the episode they’re watching if his life depended on it.

Jemma seems to enjoy holding hands as much as he does, and was quite pleased when they bumped ears last week. But Fitz has been hesitant to assume she wants to progress to a more physical relationship. For one thing, being soulmates doesn’t mandate any such requirements. And even if more overt romance is something Jemma wants, they have their entire lives ahead of them still, and he definitely doesn’t want to come across as impatient.

Most of the time, Fitz is rather nervous at the thought of progressing at all. All this is still so new, every tiny new touch so overwhelming, the thought of snogging the way people did in high school or baring any skin that’s normally covered by essential articles of clothing is a bit terrifying.

But sometimes, curiosity claws at his mind so strongly it’s hard to focus on anything else. And this is one of those times.

It’s just maddening, having Jemma sitting right next to him as often as she does, knowing she could unlock his sense of touch _anywhere she wanted_ , whenever she wanted. He would never want to do anything, ever, that she didn’t also verbally consent to doing, but his curiosity is only getting more intense by the day. His hands almost feel detached from the rest of his body, sometimes – completely separate entities that operate by different physiological rules than the rest of him. What would it be like to feel the clothes on his body? To take a shower and feel every droplet of water? To really, fully _experience_ a hug from Jemma? Or to kiss her? Yeah, sometimes... he does still think about kissing her. Everyone else seems to properly enjoy it, and Jemma’s mouth continues to be something he’s strangely drawn to, pink and soft and gentle as it is.

About thirty-five minutes in, he decides he has to do something. The episode will be over soon, and he may miss this unique window altogether.

Gently, he loosens his grip on her hand. Sensing he wants to let go, she loosens her grip, as well. Still intently focused on the computer screen, she evidently doesn’t think much of it, probably thinking he just wants to rearrange himself or reach for a snack.

With a few deep breaths and a few false starts, he carefully lowers his hand to her forearm, stroking her skin with the back of his hand. He only covers a few inches, testing her reaction.

Jemma gasps, her arm jumping away from his hand.

Fitz immediately retracts his arm, silently rebuking himself for his boldness.

“I’m sorry, was that... not okay?”

“No, no, you just startled me.” Jemma shakes her head, gathering herself. “It’s more than okay,” she reassures him.

“You sure?” he asks, trying to stifle down his smile as not to pressure her to saying yes.

“I’m sure.” She nods.

Encouraged, he brings his hand back to her arm, lightly brushing his fingers slightly higher than where they’d been before. Gooseflesh follows the path of his knuckles, and Jemma hums contentedly. Glancing up at her face, he sees her eyes are still trained on the computer screen. Because she’s not so affected by this process anymore and can still easily focus on the episode? Or is she only pretending to be still watching, to stop herself from reacting more strongly? He hopes it’s the latter.

He takes his time exploring the surface of her arm, awakening a billion new nerve endings all the way to her elbow. Eventually, he has to shift towards her some more and lift her arm with his other hand to reach the inside surface of her arm. When he’s confident he’s covered all its surface area, he gently rests her arm back on the bed to signal she can stop him whenever she wants. But when she doesn’t immediately pull away, he rests his hand near her wrist, rubbing his thumb back and forth because he doesn’t want to stop touching her. It’s so different from touching his own arm, the skin softer, the bones in her wrist more pronounced.

Several long moments pass where the only voices in the room are Sherlock and Joan’s. During the brief moments of quiet from the laptop, the room is so silent Fitz thinks neither of them is actually breathing. It’s suddenly far more intimate now; now that his actions have been spent of their utility and they both know they’re just letting this continue because they’re enjoying it. It’s a heady feeling, knowing he can do this to her. That he has the ability to completely change her biology, how she interacts with the universe, with a simple touch from his hand. His heart is thudding in his chest, his breaths fast and shallow to the point of making him lightheaded.

Fitz can only imagine how much she’s processing right now. What is she going to do when this episode ends, and they’re left with nothing to use as a distraction to postpone addressing what just happened? Will she ask him to move even higher? Repeat the process on her other arm? Will she be caught up in the moment and kiss him? (He thinks that one is unlikely, but he’d really like it.)

If he knows Jemma at all, she’ll probably simply want to return the favour; but somehow, that makes him even more nervous. He’s desperate for her to do so, and would never decline such an offer, but it hasn’t become any easier keeping himself as still and quiet as she can.

“Wow,” Jemma says as soon as the credits begin to roll. She gestures down to her arm to indicate she isn’t talking about whatever cliff-hanger the Elementary showrunners have left them with.

“Half an arm,” Fitz jokes, trying both to calm himself and to lighten what has become an undeniably sensual mood.

For a while, she seems mesmerised by his hand, her gaze fixed on thumb still lightly stroking her arm like she can’t believe it’s happening.

“Want me to return the favour?” she asks after a few moments, glancing up at him.

Oh, finally.

“Sure,” he says, not hesitating but also trying not to sound overly eager. He’s still wearing his jumper, so he rolls up the sleeve to the elbow before he offers her his arm.

“Where’s that spot that I’ve already got you?” she asks, taking his hand.

“Right...” He drags his fingertip over the spot. “here.”

“Sorry it’s about to disappear.”

“That’s really not a problem,” he says, his stomach doing somersaults in his gut.

For lack of anything to pretend to watch now, he closes his eyes as she slowly stirs the sensation in his arm to life. Compared to the bits of their hands they did before, this is a lot more area to cover. And Jemma’s hand is so soft and small and gentle... her touch is so light it almost tickles (a term he’s only recently familiar with). The hairs on his arm stand up as shivers roll beneath his skin. His heart flutters in his chest, and he has to hold his breath in intervals to keep from hyperventilating. The underside of his arm is even more sensitive; several times Fitz has to gulp back a small moan at how sinfully good it feels.

“Tha’was... really nice,” he mumbles out when there’s no numb skin left. His whole arm is warm and filled with fuzzy little tingles like it’s been injected with some sort of liquid pleasure, so he lets himself off the hook for sounding a bit inebriated.

“It was, wasn’t it?” she says, sounding as relieved as he feels that they agree on that point. She bites her cheek, just staring at him for a moment. “It’s not weird, is it?” she asks.

The implied qualifying phrase that she’s left out is, he assumes, ‘for friends.’ If it’s weird for just friends to do this.

“I don’t think so,” he shrugs, shaking his head.

“This is what we’re supposed to do, right?” she asks, seeming encouraged by his answer.

“Exactly. We’ve gone our whole lives without being able to feel anything. It’s only natural to run with it, now that we’ve got it.”

“It is sort of weird, how much power we have over each other, though, isn’t it?” She scrunches up her nose the way she does, and Fitz’s heart clenches. It’s exactly what he’d been thinking only minutes earlier.

“Suppose it is a bit weird, yeah,” he agrees, feeling his face heat up.

Despite this acknowledgement, their hands find one another as easily as ever, and pressing their newly sensitive arms against each other, sighing in harmony. They sit in silence like this for a while, staring down at their linked hands, and Fitz wonders what Jemma is thinking. If she’s still processing what they’ve just done or if she’s as curious or terrified as he is to go even further. But she doesn’t let him wonder long.

“D’you want to do our other arms?” she asks with a shy smile.

He nods immediately.

“I really do.”

\---

On Halloween, they buy a shopping bag full of candy and set up in Jemma’s room with the intent to watch the Nightmare Before Christmas when they finish their schoolwork. But they’re both so excited for the first holiday of the season, they switch over to the film before they’ve finished with their assignments.

As per usual, Jemma lets him use her backrest and props a few of her pillows up against the wall for herself. After turning off the light, she settles down next to him, resting her laptop and their candy stash between them before pressing play.

Fitz reaches for a pack of Reese’s to distract his hands from reaching for her straight away.

Now that they’ve got their arms up to their elbows covered, Fitz fears they may have hit a temporary wall. Since it’s already nearing winter, they’re both usually wearing long sleeves, and neither of them ever wears shorts. There’s no appropriate platonic way to ask your best friend (/soulmate) to touch you somewhere that’s currently covered by clothes, and the thought alone is mortifying. Their necks and faces are generally exposed, he supposes, and he still only has that one spot of sensation on his nose. But that’s overtly intimate too, stroking a friend’s face.

They’ve been in a strange limbo since that night, more comfortable than ever in each other’s presence, but not quite comfortable enough to push their intimacy boundary past their forearms.

They haven’t yet had a frank conversation about if or how their relationship should progress from friends to more. And Fitz feels like it’s a bit of a problem, considering any touching beyond hugs and hand-holding crosses into romantic territory automatically. If they ever want to unlock more of their sensory receptors than they have already, they’re going to have to break some friendship barriers. He’s just been a bit too shy to bring that up in so many words. He assumes she feels the same way, since she hasn’t brought it up, either.

About halfway through the film, Fitz is so caught up in thoughts of touching or not touching Jemma that his instincts sort of take over, and he puts his arm around her shoulders without even thinking.

He almost takes it away immediately, worried this is an overtly romantic gesture that she may reject. But Jemma doesn’t flinch or pull away to indicate it feels like a weird thing for friends to do. In fact, she hardly reacts at all. She scoots slightly closer to him to make it easier for him, like she’d been waiting for him to do it.

The heating is on extra high in the dorms tonight, and they both get a bit warm as the movie goes on and the sugar and closeness speed up their metabolism. Fitz eventually takes off his cardigan, leaving him in just a t-shirt. And whether she gets hot, too, or she’s just spurred to action by the loss of his long sleeves, before long Jemma claims she’s warm, too. Fitz gives her some space to take off her jumper, and she’s left in only a v-neck with short sleeves. It’s as much skin as they’ve ever both shown while alone together, and suddenly Fitz’s nervousness is back.

He leaves his hand on the top of her pillows, unsure whether she’d want it back where it was now that there’s so much skin exposed there. But less than a minute later, she reaches up with her left hand to pull his down onto her shoulder again. He hesitates, though, before curling his hand around her arm again. They’ve never gone above the elbow before. Still, she wouldn’t have done that if she wasn’t giving him permission, right?

Cautiously, he shifts his hand down her arm until the fabric of her shirt ends and he’s met with flushed, smooth skin. Jemma hums quietly in approval, and Fitz leaves his hand there. Occasionally, he rubs his hand gently up and down her arm, expanding the range of feeling she’ll be able to glean from the encounter.

It’s not until the credits are rolling that he pulls his arm away. Watching Jack and Sally kiss beneath the moon has definitely brought some latent desires of kissing her to the surface, but he tries to squash those down. It’s _definitely_ too soon for _that_.

Instead, once Jemma has had a chance to stretch out from sitting still so long, he leans forward and holds out his arm. With a smirk, he nods his head down to his shoulder.

“It’s only fair,” he says playfully, hoping he doesn’t sound bossy or creepy.

Jemma giggles, and he’s indescribably relieved.

“Quite right, Fitz.”

Perhaps it’s only because it’s been a while since their last session, or maybe it’s because this was relatively unexpected, but it feels even better than usual when she reaches a new spot. Perhaps she’s just gotten better at knowing exactly what to do to drive him mad.

It isn’t long before they decide to even out both arms up to their shirt sleeves, moving the laptop and candy aside and turning to face each other on the bed for the easiest access.

Even long after there’s no exposed skin left on their arms lacking sensation, they can’t seem to let each other go. Whether pretending they’ve missed a spot, or simply holding each other’s hands, quietly dreaming of continuing this process elsewhere down the road, they become so wrapped up in each other that they never do get the chance return to their assignments before curfew hits.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is it - the end! I decided to post up the final installment even though I just updated a few days ago, partly because I had missed a week on the last update, and partly because I really need to get back to my other WIP the next time I have a chance to dive into anything writing-related. So... here it is! I really hope you guys like the ending. I honestly do like how it turned out. Man, I'm going to miss these sweet lil' kids. So much.
> 
> Anyway, without further ado! <3

Since Halloween, Jemma and Fitz have been in a strange limbo. With basically all of their arms sensitized now, Jemma isn’t sure how much anatomy there is to cover that won’t push them unambiguously into romantic relationship territory.

It is already quite cold here in New Jersey. They really don’t have anywhere left to touch that isn’t constantly covered by clothes. Well, except most of the collar up, but that region has been tacitly put into an off-limits category. Friends simply don’t touch one another’s faces.

It’s just... her curiosity getting to her. Lips, in particular, are still especially intriguing to her, among other supposedly erogenous zones. She’d still really like to learn what Fitz’s hair feels like compared with her own. As nice as it is to hold hands while they’re watching telly, she can’t help imagining how much nicer it’d be to properly cuddle, to someday be able to feel his whole body against hers.

They really ought to have a frank conversation about their expectations and hopes for a physical relationship, if they even want one, but Jemma has been too nervous to bring it up. It’s so easy, so wonderfully naturally being with Fitz, just holding his hand or (more recently) stroking his arm. She doesn’t want to muck it up by telling him she wants to add in things like snogging. They have an entire lifetime to get to that and she’s really making an effort not to be impatient.

Despite this internal quandary about their future, Jemma is ecstatic about the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday. Both of them are in the minority of students staying on campus over the short break. Most of this crowd are either international students who haven’t lived in the States long enough to adopt it as a holiday of their own, or simply natives who aren’t close enough with their families to bother with a four-day trip. With no classes meeting, all that matters to Jemma is that she’ll get to spend four whole days with Fitz with little interruption. A perfect opportunity to strengthen their relationship, and get just a little closer to some answers to her poorly-formed questions.

They are productive at first, working on the dwarf models together, helping each other decide which graduate programs to apply to. (They tend to emphasize schools that have both biochemistry _and_ mechanical engineering programs, without either of them explicitly mentioning they don’t want to be apart when they leave here.) With a couple of turkey sandwiches for dinner on Thursday (and of course, some of Jemma’s famous pesto aioli recipe), they consider themselves festive enough.

They try to catch some of Friday’s sales at the shoddy little mall downtown, but neither of them has much luck finding early Christmas gifts.

Jemma drags Fitz to an ice skating rink on Saturday, and it’s the most they’ve ever touched each other, with the way Jemma keeps clutching onto Fitz when she’s about to fall, and vice versa. (It’s the biggest shame yet that they’re wearing fluffy coats and gloves such that despite their constant, frantic grappling for one another, none of it yields any new sensation.)

As they’re stepping carefully off the ice back onto ground with friction, a couple of three-foot-tall kids skate along with ease, leaving their parents in the powder they create with each turn. They lean over the railing for a breather, and Fitz heartily reassures her it’s not a lack of skill that caused their ineptitude, but the fact that they still can’t properly feel their feet.

“You think so?” It’s a weak attempt at making her feel better, but it still makes her smile.

“Well,” Fitz cocks his head to the side, his mouth turning down into a frown as he watches everyone else on the ice. “That’s what I’m gonna tell myself.”

Jemma chuckles.

With some difficulty, he turns his back to the wall and offers his elbow for her to take. She grabs onto it with both hands, and lets him lead the way to the closest bench to get these rental death traps off.

Just as they’ve swapped their skates for their regular shoes and begin the walk back to the bus, the first snow of the season begins to fall. They spend a few minutes catching the floating flakes on their gloves and tongues before the cold starts to properly get to them. By the time they reach the bus, Fitz’s hair is flecked with white. Seeing it as an opportunity if there ever was one, Jemma surreptitiously takes off one of her gloves and takes it upon herself to brush the flakes out of his hair. It’s just as nice as she’d imagined it: soft and fluffy, and those tight curls are actually rather fun to play with. Even once the snow is all gone or melted into his hair, Jemma boldly runs her fingers through it a bit more, just for good measure.

As soon as she’s done toying with his hair, they climb onto the rather empty bus. His cheeks even redder than they had been out in the frost, he runs his own hand through his hair as they scan for two adjacent empty seats (no doubt testing the newly active neurons there). Once they’re settled in, Fitz glances pointedly up at the knit cap on her head, and makes a face like he doesn’t quite think that’s fair.

The next morning, Jemma wakes up with a horribly sore throat and a drippy nose.

Crushed to be losing the last day of their holiday together, she includes several sad emojis in her text to Fitz, saying she has a cold and won’t be able to make it to breakfast like they’d planned.

He never responds, and she feels even more awful for cancelling on him. He must be upset. But she doesn’t want to get him sick, too – they’ve both got a busy week ahead and she doesn’t want him to suffer because of her.

Furious with the universe and whatever microbe has taken up residence in her respiratory tract, she tries to just go back to sleep, hoping she can be unconscious through the worst of the disappointment and guilt over Fitz.

But barely thirty minutes later, there’s a knock at her door.

Ugh. Must be May or one of her suitemates checking up on her. Still hardly able to lift her head with the way it’s throbbing and spinning, she doesn’t want to get up and open it, so she shouts as best she can at the door. It comes out more of a squawk.

“Come in.”

She gasps and sits up in her bed when she sees it’s Fitz. Without preamble, he walks straight up to her bed and sets down a bag and a paper coffee cup down on her desk.

“What are you doing here?” she asks, hoping she doesn’t look as awful as she feels. Her hair must be a right mess, and she can practically feel the dark circles under her eyes.

“You really think I’d leave you to fend for yourself when you’re sick?” he asks, like she’s a complete nutter for asking.

Well, when he puts it that way...

“Thank you, Fitz.” She tilts her head affectionately.

“How’re you feeling?”

“Not great,” she confesses. She shivers just at the right moment, and pulls her blankets up to her chin in response.

To her surprise, Fitz reaches out and presses the back of his hand against her forehead.

“Feverish?” he asks.

She just nods, shivering again. Less just from the fever this time, more from him touching her head. Retribution, she supposes, for her running her hand through his hair for so long last night.

He pulls a thermos and a box of cold medicine out of the bag. Tearing it open, he pops out a couple pills and hands them to her with the coffee cup.

“Tea?” she asks, trying to peer through the tiny hole in the white lid. It feels cold.

“Orange juice,” he says.

“I don’t want orange juice,” Jemma whinges, making a face.

“Vitamin C, Jemma,” Fitz insists. “Just drink half of it. Then I’ll fix you some tea.” He holds up the thermos in promise.

The next half hour, he doesn’t let her get out of bed for anything. He fixes her cinnamon porridge in her microwave, and makes an additional trip down to the small university convenience store to get cough drops for her throat.

With food and medicine and plenty of warm fluids in her system, she’s feeling a bit better. But there’s no question this room still an incubus for whatever virus this is, and if he sticks around he’s certain to catch it.

“You really shouldn’t stay, Fitz,” she pleads. She’s settled in for at least several hours now; he’s really done enough.

Fitz simply rolls his eyes.

“Jemma, I’m not going to let a little rhinovirus ruin our plans,” he says, digging into his backpack and pulling out several long cords. “This week is gonna be mad, we won’t have another day together ‘til next Sunday, probably.”

Jemma finds she doesn’t mind that Fitz is planning out their next day together before their current one is over.

Leaving the blanket at her waist, she doesn’t bother arguing with him anymore, knowing there’s no changing Fitz’s mind once it’s made up. And so, as planned, they spend most of the day playing retro games on his computer (he’s got a super Nintendo emulator and the classic controllers to go with it).

Fitz makes the trips to central campus to get both their lunch and dinner. (She misses him the whole time he’s gone.)

Before he leaves that evening (a nighttime pill and a large container of chicken soup later), he checks her temperature with his hand again. Already under the dizzying influence of the medication, she sighs contentedly when he touches her forehead.

“Your hand feels nice,” she mumbles, grinning.

“G’night, Jemma.”

\---

With end-of-the-semester projects, finals, and constantly researching and informally interviewing for laboratory positions, the last few weeks of the semester fly by for both Fitz and Jemma. Basically all the time they spend together is to help one another study, prepare for their interviews, or just to catch up on their week over lunch or dinner.

Before either of them realises it, it’s the very day Jemma is scheduled to leave town for the holidays. Her flight is late tonight; Fitz’s metro bus back home is early tomorrow morning. They’ve both aced their finals so far and secured positions in laboratories starting next semester, so tonight, at least until Jemma has to head to the airport, they finally get to celebrate and just be together.

Fitz has his last final after hers, and since her dorm is on the way to the Caf, they had agreed to meet here and head to dinner together.

“Hey!” she exclaims when he shuffles through her door frame unexpectedly. “You didn’t text me,” she says, pulling out her phone to double check she hadn’t missed it.

“Nah, some girl let me in on her way out,” he explains.

“How’d it go?” she asks, throwing a few more things in her suitcase.

“Easy.” He waves a hand dismissively.

“We knew it would be, I suppose,” Jemma says with a proud smile.

“All packed, then?” he asks, gesturing to her rather full suitcase.

“Almost. I can save the rest ‘til we get back.” It’s only half six, and her shuttle for the airport doesn’t arrive until ten. “Ready to go?” she asks, straightening up and grabbing her coat.

“Actually, I was thinking…” Fitz begins. But for whatever reason, he’s having trouble finishing the sentence, staring anywhere but her face and fidgeting restlessly.

Jemma’s heart sinks. Does he not want to get dinner anymore? It’s their last night together. There can’t be someone else he’d rather spend it with, can there?

“Maybe we could eat somewhere else, you know? Somewhere… nice.”

“Oh,” she breathes out, dumbfounded. It’s not what she expected to hear, but it’s the sort of surprise that makes her heart flutter. Like when he showed up with a goodie bag and felt her forehead when she was sick.

“Er, nicer than the Caf, at least.” He shrugs. “There’s a place, just down Second street.” He gestures vaguely behind himself. “Indian. On me?” He holds open his palms in invitation.

“I like Indian,” she says, beaming at him and hoping it conveys her strong interest.

“Good,” he smiles back, his posture instantly more relaxed. “Settled, then.”

\---

Jemma expects them to head to the nearest bus stop since they’re heading off campus (and it’s free for students), but tonight he walks her to the adjacent parking lot, where there’s somehow already a Lyft waiting for them. He opens the door for her, and makes a show of gesturing inside as he lets her climb in the back first.

Once they’re at the restaurant, he helps her with her two coats and pulls out her chair for her though it’s hardly necessary. With anyone else she might be annoyed at the outdated chivalry, but coming from Fitz, it’s nothing less than adorable.

It’s actually a nice place, table service and fancy plates and authentic Indian names of dishes on the menu. Fitz has really tried to make their last night special, and it makes Jemma’s stomach do little backflips as she’s scanning through the menu for options.

Sharing an appetiser plate of samosas, they briefly discuss their finals and what courses next semester has in store for them both. They fill one another in on details of the lab positions they’ve accepted while they mop up various Indian specialties with naan: the specific projects they’ll be working on, what their co-workers and PI are like. And nibbling on their dessert – syrupy, cardamom-rich _gulab jamun_ – they tell each other about their holiday plans.

By the time they’ve finished eating and catching up on the last hectic week, it’s nearly nine. Her shuttle departure time is now fast approaching.

Jemma looks up from the time on her phone with a pronounced frown.

“We should get back, Fitz,” she announces morosely. “My shuttle will be there in an hour.”

“Do you really have to take a red-eye to get home?” His face screws up into a grimace. “Can’t you leave tomorrow instead?”

He folds his arms on the table, his big, sad blue eyes pleading with hers, and Jemma’s heart just about shatters. She doesn’t want to leave tonight, either. In fact, she’d like to just skip her flight completely and climb into Fitz’s cab with him tomorrow morning. She can buy herself a ticket for his Big-Apple-bound bus when they get to the station, right?

Oh, but her parents would go simply mad. They truthfully don’t even know that much about Fitz. They likely wouldn’t approve of her delaying her holiday plans last-minute for a strange boy they’ve never met, even if he is her soulmate. After Uncle Jeff, neither of them has much faith in the process, either.

“I wish I could, Fitz. Really.” Jemma hopes her tone is conveying even a fraction of the longing she’s feeling right now.

Fitz’s face falls even further as he pulls out his phone to summon their Lyft back to campus.

Though she loves Christmas and misses her family, Jemma is sort of dreading this trip home. This holiday will be the longest they’ve been apart since they met, by far. Three weeks. But how could she possibly confess such a thing to her own parents, or to Fitz himself, for that matter? That she can hardly bear the thought being apart from him for a mere matter of weeks?

The drive back to campus is spent mostly in sombre silence. It’s toasty inside the car, so they both forego their gloves once they’re buckled in so they can properly hold hands the whole way home. Neither of them wants to squander their last hour to touch one another just because they’re sad.

Jemma also doesn’t want to squander her last chance of the year to tell Fitz how much he already means to her, but simply doesn’t know what to say. How to say goodbye to him, whether to tell him how much she’s going to miss him. She’s been so busy with other things and so excited about this dinner she hasn’t mentally prepared herself for goodbye. God knows she’s terrible at improvisation, especially when it comes to emotional matters, and without any prior preparation or rehearsal, she’s afraid she’ll wind up saying nothing for fear of saying the wrong thing.

Despite his reluctance for her to go, Fitz helps her finish packing up her things, and runs through a verbal checklist with her. Wallet, ID, ticket, laptop, phone, chargers.

“Think you’re all set.” Fitz shrugs, half of his mouth pulling down.

Checking her phone, Jemma sees there’s only about ten minutes until they have to walk out to meet the shuttle.

She suddenly can’t bear the thought of not saying goodbye properly.

Before she can talk herself out of it, she marches right up to him and crashes into his chest, throwing her arms around him, slouching down so she can bury her head in his cardigan. Still unable to feel anything in the torso, she needs to hold him tightly to know he’s there. His arms wrap around her, too, not bothered that she’s holding on so desperately, and he doesn’t let her go.

As he holds her, and Jemma closes her eyes and mourns the fact that she can’t feel his jumper against her cheek. Nor even his arms on her back. She can only tell he’s slowly moving them by the slight muffled sound, and the way she can sense his back muscles moving under her hands. She rubs her hands lightly on his back, too, comforted somewhat by the fact that she can feel the texture of his cardigan there, and savour it. They’ve never let a hug go on like this; every time they’ve hugged before it’s been quick, a greeting or very temporary goodbye. Though she can’t feel much of anything beyond her arms, she doesn’t want to let him go.

“I’ll miss you, Jemma,” Fitz breathes.

“I’ll miss you so much,” Jemma whispers back, squeezing her eyes closed to stave off tears.

A short moment later, Fitz’s cheek comes to rest on top of her head. Though it’s a strange place to have new sensation, it adds another dimension to their embrace – another tangible layer of proof that he’s wrapped around her – and she can’t help but sigh against his chest. They just hold each other while the minutes tick by, and Jemma tries to keep track of how much longer they have to embrace before she has to leave. But after a while, she stops thinking altogether and just allows herself to enjoy this rare moment of intimacy she doesn’t know when she’ll have again. Having him this close is simply heavenly. He’s warm, and his jumper smells like detergent and sweet pine.

Another minute passes before Jemma realises there’s another repercussion of what Fitz has done.

Slowly, gently, she pulls out of his embrace, taking a step back from him so she can see his face.

As soon as his arms are freed, he brings a hand to his face, brushing his knuckles along his cheek. When he meets Jemma’s eyes, he looks guilty.

“Oh.” Instinctively, she grabs his hand and presses it against her cheek, moisture brimming in her eyes the moment it makes contact. It feels _so good_ , his just slightly toughened palm pressed softly against her smooth cheek. It’s warm and tender and it makes her brain scream for more, for his other hand to hold her face too, to grab him by his stupid cardigan and snog him and just claim him as _hers_ so there’ll be no ambiguity while they’re apart.

She drops her hand away, but he doesn’t move his hand, still cradling her jaw, stroking his thumb. Knowing she can’t withstand the temptation of staring at his glassy blue eyes and perfect rosy lips turned down in sadness, she closes her eyes. Leans into his touch and futilely wishes it would last forever.

But before forever can pass, his hand shifts down to her jaw. His thumb wanders closer to her lip.

Too close.

Oh, this isn’t how she wanted... that to happen, if it ever did.

“Fitz,” she stops him before he can reach it, opening her eyes.

He pulls his hand away immediately. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to...”

“No, it’s not that.” She shakes her head, scrambling to explain this properly without making it seem like she’s rejecting his intimate gesture in any way. “It’s just... it’s stupid, but... I wanted to save... that.”

His gaze is locked on hers, but his expression is unreadable. Is he understanding, or not?

“In case we ever...” she trails off again.

“Kissed?” he guesses. He looks guilty, like he shouldn’t want to kiss his soulmate. She’d find it endearingly silly, if she didn’t feel the exact same way right now. Oh, why do they keep doing this?

She nods, letting out a long-held breath. “Yeah.”

“Is that... something you’d want?”

“I’ve thought about it,” she hedges, still hesitant to express any eagerness.

“Jemma.”

“Yes,” she admits, the single syllable almost harsh in the silence.

An eternity seems to pass as he mulls over the single syllable, his eyes flitting back and forth between her eyes and her lips.

Until one moment, when he finally shrugs off the last of his hesitation, grabs her by the waist and presses his mouth to hers.

As their lips collide and sensation explodes from the point of contact, all the air seems to leave Jemma’s lungs at once. Her legs turn to jelly. As she slumps in his arms, he stumbles forward a bit, pressing her against her bed to prevent them both from falling to the floor. It’s so much more, so much better, than she’d attempted to imagine it. His lips soft but determined, moulding perfectly to hers as he presses harder. His nose just barely tickling her cheek.

He pulls away too soon, leaving Jemma breathless as countless neurons around her mouth come alive, buzzing with warm electricity. He takes a step backward, giving her space she doesn’t want. They both lift a hand to their mouths straight away, unable to resist testing the new sensitivity with a couple of fingers. This is without question the most sensitive place he’s gotten her so far. And those were definitely the best two seconds of her entire life.

She lowers her hand, and Fitz is just staring at her, lightly nibbling one side of his bottom lip, waiting for her to respond in some way, to tell her if that was ok or out of line or...

“You missed a spot,” she breathes out, reaching her hands up to cradle his face as she goes in for a second kiss.

It’s even better than the first one. A bit more wet, smoother and easier. They have the courage to move their lips this time, learning the contour of each other’s mouth. One hand behind his head to hold him fast, his hair tickles her skin as she runs her fingers through it. When he doesn’t show any signs of pulling away, she slowly shifts her hand, grazing the side of his neck before coming to rest on his jaw, thumbs brushing gently over his smooth cheeks. His arms wrap around her waist, clutching onto her so tightly that she can feel the pressure beneath her skin.

It’s all enough to make her properly dizzy. Her toes curl in her shoes and there’s a warm sort of desire kindling in her belly, catching in a positive feedback loop that only makes her want to kiss him deeper. Longer. Their technique perhaps isn’t great yet, just a little messy and uncoordinated, but it doesn’t detract from the moment. They both realise they’re not experts, so they take it all the more slowly and gently, content to take their first lesson from each other.

It’s too soon that Fitz loosens his grip and brings his hands up to hers, delicately pulling her hands away so they can part.

For a long moment, all either of them can do is let out a few long-held, shaky breaths and gaze into each other’s eyes in disbelief.

“We shouldn’t have waited so long to do that,” she says, still breathing heavily.

Fitz agrees by shaking his head with a soft smile. “I think we’ve got to go though, Jemma.” With a glance down to her mouth, he subtly swipes his tongue along his bottom lip, completely belying his words.

Jemma sighs in frustration, but reaches behind her to pull her phone up off her bed anyway.

_9:59_

Jemma is torn: between the sheer euphoria that they’ve just kissed and suddenly wordlessly agreed they want something a bit more than friendship, and utter despair that despite all that, they’re still about to be apart for almost a month.

“I know you said you had Christmas plans,” Jemma says as they step into the hall and she locks her door. “But maybe, I dunno. Maybe I could come to New York. We could ring in the new year together.” Apparently, that kiss has given her just the confidence boost she needed to bring this up.

“My mum and I, we’ve just got this tiny flat,” Fitz explains with dismay. “There’s no place to stay.”

Jemma could cry.

“We’ve got a guest bedroom,” she offers.

He’s silent for a moment, churning through her offer as they head down the stairs.

“Think I can talk my mum into letting me pop to Los Angeles for a couple of days, if I get on the phone with her straight away.” He chuckles.

“Really?!” Her steps turn to bounces as they head out the door into the chilled night.

“I’ve got just about enough money saved for a one-way flight, too, if I can find one.” Jemma’s heart soars ever higher. “If you can help me cover the rest...”

“Oh, I can!” Jemma interjects, leaping into his arms.

 “I should really tell you though,” Fitz adds as he warmly accepts her embrace. “I make a terrible new year’s date. Most years, I don’t even pay attention to the time.”

“I’ll make sure to watch the clock for you, then,” Jemma teases back as they part ways.

The shuttle is already waiting in the car park. Fitz confirms it’s the right shuttle to the correct airport, then helps her load up their things into the back.

Jemma promises to call him when she lands; Fitz promises to look at flights.

With their last moment together, they share one more kiss in the frosty starlight.

\---

Fitz does make it to L.A. to celebrate the new year with Jemma. As it turns out, January 1st is on a Tuesday this year. And right around 2pm, they both stop to reminisce on that first day in Gen Chem lab. _Reactions of copper._

Huddled together to one side of the Simmons’ spacious couch, they clink cocoa mugs together and press play on the next episode of _Who_ , both confident this year is bound to be their best year yet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've purposely left the door wide open to return to this 'verse in the future, probably in the form of one-shot(s). I'm not guaranteeing it, nor can I estimate when that might happen, but I think it'd be awesome to come back to it someday - so many lovely possibilities to explore with this concept. I honestly daydream about it tbh! So, if you're at all interested, keep your eyes peeled. Or maybe even subscribe ;)


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